How do you change the 9213 thermocouple selection

[bowman@uab.edu]

I am using the Thermocouple - Continuous Input.vi ‏118 KB  as a basis for this question.  I would like to change the selection of the input from a one line that shows ai/0 and requires the user to click multiple times to select multiple inputs.

I would like to see a list of all the inputs and be able to select from the list. On the line, for each individaul selection, have a button to select that input. The button would open a user input window and the user would be able to click on a couple of drop down boxes and select information about that particular input.  On this popup window would be press a Start button and the plot for that specific input would be added to an already running chart.

Any suggestions?

[Jacobson-ni]

Bowman,

Adding thermocouple channels to your view on the fly is a little tricky becuase once you start acquiring data on channel you have reserved that hardware resource.  If you want to then add another thermocouple channel, you would need to stop the task and start it again with your new channel selection.  That then leads to the problem that you have lost all of the data that would have come in during the time you stopped and started the task.  If this isn't a problem then I would suggest doing this.

Because thermocouples usually don't acquire data at a very high rate, though, you could also just acquire data from every channel all the time.  If the user is not interested in that channel, the data can be discarded but if the user wants to make that selection, the data can be added to the graph.

[bowman@uab.edu]

OK, the hardware may be able to collect the data all the time, but I do not want to see the plot on the chart or collect data for that specific TC until the user selects it from the list and clicks the Go button to bring up the user input screen.  Once he has put in his information about that specific run, he would click Start on this screen, the plot would show up on the chart and start graphing and the data would be stored in s spreadsheet for later use.  After the run is over, 3 to 5 hours later, he would click Stop for that particular TC run.  At the same time, he may be doing the same thing on 10 other TC channels and have 10 different starting and stopping times all day long.  The chart would be a 12 hour moving window not related to a specific TC.  The TC plots would show up on the chart when that run is started, and disappear when the stop button for that run is pushed.