Remote control of tds3000 and testequity chamber

[New2Labview05]

Hello,

This is my very first post on this board. Im hoping the community can help me out with a few questions I have. This is what Im trying to achieve. I am part of a team of engineers and tech's that are developing a new board design. We are in the process of developing the circuit. I am the lab tech assigned to complete testing of proposed circuits. The engineers are requesting that I test these designs at various temperatures. We have set up our test bed remote to my lab so I have to run all over the place and set my oven temperature, wait for it to reach temp, let soak, and then collect 4 waveforms on the scope. I am trying to set up a testbed that I can run remotely from the lab using labview and collect the waveforms and dump them into an excel spreadsheet for the engineers to evaluate. I have a testequity environmental chamber which has the ability to be controlled using GPIB. It has a Watlow F4 controller. It uses Modbus to communicate. I also am using a Tektronixs tds3000 family 4 channel oscope. This instrument has GPIB interface capabilities also. I have looked at NI site and they have drivers for the scope and the controller on the oven. I was sent to labview training a few months ago in Ohio, so I'd like to show them a good return on their investment. I have completed labview I and II. Does this sound like something I could do, or is it too complicated for the beginner. It seems it would be a great intro into real world Labview applications. I'm hoping I can get some tips and help from you guys. So in a nutshell this is what I want to do: From my desktop computer access the computer in a remote location which will be connected to the oscope and the environmental oven, monitor 4 waveforms at various temps. First at 25C. Take the readings, save files, ramp oven up to 50C take readings, save files, ramp oven to 75C, take readings, save files, and so on all the way up to 175. Im trying to keep it simple as this is my first attempt and it will be as much an assignment as it is a learning experience. Also I have Labview 7.1 developers program installed on desktop in lab. Any help you guys could give me would be greatly appreciated. Im pretty excited about this project and Labview in general. Thx in advance.

[vicky]

yeah ,
all you speak about is surely possiable with LV.so what help do u need from us,i advice you to start with what ever idea you have and then when ever you have any problem you can post that here,you will surely get a solution from here.
so best of luck and start LV coding today.
cheers
vicky

[TongY]

You can definitely do this using LabVIEW, one of the advantages of using LaBbVIEW is that it gives you the ability to configure, control and monitor the test remotely.

What you need to do is on the test machine (lab computer) build the program for the test, then you can make this testing program an executable and use the "remote front panel" feature of LabVIEW, you can publsih the front panle of your vi on a webpage and access it through your office computer and control the executable.

As a beginner of LabVIEW, I recommend you go to the NI Developer Zone and look for tutorials and example codes for similar applications, to give you an example, here is one of the tutorials to get you started:

http://zone.ni.com/devzone/conceptd.nsf/webmain/E789515B9976253786256B1F007E039B


This sounds like a great project, good luck!

[New2Labview05]

Thanks for the replies. Im at work collecting all my test equipment and hardware. I have this board to install in my computer. (NI PCI-GPIB for Windows 2000/XP High-Performance GPIB Interface for PCI). Im working in a windows nt environment. I have not established communication with my oscope or test oven yet. I'll work on that tomorrow. I also browsed the share code section and found two pre made .vi's I might be able to use. I'M going to use this one to control my oscope.(tktds3k_User_VI.llb) and this one to control my watlow f4 controller in the testequity environmental chamber.(Watlow_RampProfiler.vi) I'm so glad N.I. and the community supports that feature. I also found drivers for both the above listed items. Now its a matter of maybe combining the two .vi's. Like I said in the first post. Im going to ramp the oven up from 25c to 175c in 25c increments and take 4 oscope measurements at each temperature and then dump that to a .csv file for excel. Do you guys know of any examples that may illustrate this? or perhaps more tutorials? Im trying to figure out how I'm going to connect the two pieces of equipment together. Im assuming I'll go GPIB because the oscope has it but the controller has a serial RS-232 input. I think I can get a converter for it similar to this one.http://www.ni.com/pdf/products/us/4gpib688-690.pdf. This is a total newbie question but how am I going to connect the two external devices to my NI-PCI-GPIB card when it only has one gpib connector on it? Any suggestions? Well I'll close for now and think about my project a little more. How time flies when your working with Lab-View.

[Dennis_Knutson]

If the Testequity really has an RS-232 connector instead of the GPIB you mentioned in your first post, then you don't need a GPIB to Serial converter. You can simply connect the chamber to your pc's serial port. I only have GPIB chambers but I believe the protocol and commands are the same. If the driver you have for the chamber uses VISA Reads and Writes, then you may not have to make any changes to it. An instrument driver that uses VISA has a VISA Resource Name control. This control can be set to communicate with GPIB, Serial, TCP/IP, USB instruments with little or no changes required. If the chamber does have a GPIB port, you connect them to the pc with two separate GPIB cables. This can be either a star or daisy chain configuration. With a star configuration, you have each cable connected from the pc to the instrument. With a daisy chain, you connect one cable from the pc to instrument 1 and then another cable from instrument 1 to instrument 2. GPIB cables are designed to be stacked.

For ramping a temperature, I usually use a while loop with a shift register for this. There are also shipping examples on shift registers that you should look at. For writing .csv files, a function called Write to Spreadsheet File is designed to do exactly that.

I've attached a picture that should give you an idea of what your VI would look like.

[New2Labview05]

Thx for your help. The jpeg was very helpful. This is my first real world project so I'm kind of on my own on this. Im hoping you guys will continue the support. I really want to learn this software package. I have attended N.I.'s training seminar. I went through Labview I and II. But they concentrated on writing programs, no hardware at all. They had the N.I. test simulator there. So I had no Idea how to connect this stuff up. I am reading and asking all kinds of questions, so with time and patience I think I can do this. My controller does have a rs232 port on it and I do have a serial port on my comp. I ran a program called WatView and got good communications with the controller. But this software is very limited. Nowhere near as powerful as labview. The controller uses Modbus to communicate. I still have to research that and see if Labview works with it. Im sure its possible because someone already created a .VI for this Watlow F4 controller. I think they used GPIB though. Ill have to see how serial communication works with Labview.

[Chip1]

I use LabVIEW to communicate to a Watlow F4 controller on a TestEquity chamber using my PC serial port. It is very easy. There is an instrument driver available for download in the Instument Drive network at the NI Developer Zone at

http://sine.ni.com/apps/we/niid_web_display.download_page?p_id_guid=E3B19B3E9722659CE034080020E74861

There are examples available within this driver that will get you started.

-Chip

[sppspb]

Hello,

I cloud not find the driver at http://sine.ni.com/apps/we/niid_web_display.downlo​ad_page?p_id_guid=E3B19B3E9722659CE034080020E7486...

If you do have driver could you please post it.

Thanks