Weird characters received from instrument using serial communication in labview

[aj_dee]

Hi Bob,

Forgive me for not being so forthcoming. It is because most of these terms being used here are very foreign to me. I have to look every term up basically to understand the best way to respond. So far as I know I am just interested in acquiring current, voltage and temperature data from my device in labVIEW. It is an inbuilt controller from horizon for monitoring these variables of the fuel cell stack. I am sorry if I am not too helpful. I am trying to get up to speed with everything myself. I have attached the code that generated the data. The initial code I used seems not to work for some reason but the modified code I got here works okay and that is what I have attached in 2019 version. 

[altenbach]

It is completely useless to keep attaching the same material over and over, because it has absolutely no meaning in terms of solving your problem.

All we can tell that there is a provided LabVIEW that can read the serial data. It does not tell us how it parses it!

The attached microscopic LabVIEW program just reads the raw strings. No use! We already know that you can get the raw string!

Maybe you should contact the manufacturer of the device to see if the data structure is public. All we can do is guess!

[Bob_Schor]

Hi, @aj_dee.

     Thank you for humoring me and attaching your code.  I apologize for not paying close enough attention to your earlier posts.  I got caught up in the "puzzle" of getting "real raw data" (not "pictures" of an unknown "encoding" of the data, but the actual "bits and bytes" that I could inspect and try to decode on my own) that I didn't pay close enough attention to your original posts.

     I do remember (on looking at your recently-posted code) having seen the original post.  You have now explained that the data are coming from "an inbuilt controller from horizon for monitoring these variables of the fuel cell stack".  Do you have a manual (hopefully as a PDF) for this Controller?  In addition, you "must" have other LabVIEW code (or maybe not?, maybe just a "procedure" like "Push the Big Button on the top of the Controller to start generating data output through the serial output port based on the settings of the other dials and settings on the front of the Controller". 

     Obviously, I'm making things up because I have no idea how the data from the "fuel cell stack"  I'm a physiologist -- I have only a vague idea what a fuel cell stack is, and what its "controls and indiators" (or inputs and outputs) look like.

     So tell us more about the device that produces the data stream that you are trying to import into LabVIEW with your Controller VI.  Presumably the Controller manual has revealing information that will greatly aid us in understanding the byte stream you have provided and explain the structure of the data and @altenbach and I have surmised.  With a little bit of luck, we may be able to suggest how you can get LabVIEW to not only "listen" to your Controller as it streams data to you, but to get LabVIEW to "talk to" your Controller and (forgive the word-play) "take control of the Controller" and, with luck, get it to take over such details as setting the Controller's "controls" and pushing its "Start" and "Stop" buttons programmatically (by pushing corresponding "Start" and "Stop" buttons on your LabVIEW VI).

Bob Schor