Ecotech Serinus Gas Analyzer

[MasterAlgae]

Hello NI Community,

I am currently trying to get an Ecotech Serinus gas analyzer to communicate in labVIEW. Specifically I just want to query the instrument for instantaneous gas data.   I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with working with this instrument in labVIEW.  The device does not have any drivers and after contacting the manufacturer they told me the only way to use it in labVIEW was to use modbus protocol.  

If anyone has any insight I would greatly appreciate it.

[elcalverado · Accepted solution]

I've never used this device, but I have experience performing Modbus communication from LabVIEW. Basically, Modbus is a protocol that can be implemented on over TCP or on a standard serial port. Looking at the manual for your device, it looks like it has an RS-232 port. The manual also says that the Modbus communication method has a very limited functionality, so you may want to confirm that you can actually accomplish what you want to do using Modbus. If all you want to do is query data, I would assume you would just need to read a Modbus holding register (kind of like a tag or variable) on the device. 

There are several ways to communicate over Modbus in LabVIEW (some free, some not). Take a look at this:

Introduction to Modbus using LabVIEW

The LabVIEW DSC Module includes both an API for implementing Modbus communication programmatically as well as I/O Servers, that allow you to configure the Modbus communication in a LabVIEW project and then map the Modbus data to LabVIEW shared variables, which makes it very easy to integrate the Modbus data into your LabVIEW code. 

Hope this helps get you started!

-Jordan 

[MasterAlgae]

• In addition the following link helped understand and use the data from the registers.  https://forums.ni.com/t5/Real-Time-Measurement-and/Modbus-daq/m-p/3856901