Kingston LVUG Meeting #3 DAQ Edition

[ColeV]

Hey LabVIEW Users,

So there was a lot of response for doing a DAQ tutorial, so I am going to break from our "high level" programming concepts that apply to any language and get into the nitty gritty of how to use DAQmx. We're going to meet at 7:30 on Thursday Apr. 30 at LDD.

I will likely be using either a PCIe-6353 or a PCIe-6351 for these demos as that's what we ship with our product. I am hoping I can borrow a BNC-2110 to make it obvious how I am connecting everything. I'll also have the requisite oscilloscope and function generator as well.

I hope to be able to get through the following:

• Overview of MAX and going through the process of seeing if your hardware is connected. Also I'll highlight some of the features in MAX that can be really handy without touching any LabVIEW code.
• After that, we'll look at how to use DAQ Assistant in your LabVIEW code and tie it back to what we learned with the MAX interface.
• I'll show you how to take a DAQ Assistant, and convert it to DAQmx code that we can tweak and configure programmatically. Once we get to this point, it will be much easier to understand the code in the Example Finder, which will give you a great launching point for any of your projects.
• Finally, if there's time, we'll cover property nodes. Property nodes allow you to go from a standard "Initialize task -> Setup Timing -> Setup Triggering -> Read/Write -> Close" and lets you handle all of the corner cases that you inevitably come across. I feel like I've only scratched the surface with the possibilities in our own code.

See you soon,

Cole

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[ColeV]

Hey Team,

So not much in terms of material to give to you guys this week, the majority of the material I pulled from was in the last email. Thanks to everyone who managed to make it out.

I think the next topic I am going to cover will be design patterns in LabVIEW. This might end up being a two part series because I have quite a bit to say on the topic. I would say that before learning some of these patterns I simply didn't know how to create an application that did more than one thing (e.g. I used to have one vi for acquiring, one vi for loading, etc...). All of my program flowed from left to right on the block diagram and when they reached the end, I had to click 'run' again. It turns out, there's a better way.

Off the top of my head, I know for certain I will be covering:

• Event Structures
  
• Dialogs
  
• State Machines
  
• Queued State Machines
  

Just a quick question, which night works best for the meetings?

Until next month,

Cole