New to Labview and struggling

[notanengineeryet]

Hello, 

I am sorry if I will come off as ignorant or just plain dumb because of this easy problem. I just started using Labview last week and I don't get the grasp of it yet. I started with simple applications and I wanted to build a temperature converter from K to C and F, and F to C and K, C to K and F, but I cannot seem to find a way to connect two wires to one thermometer (by doing two different arithmetical operations), maybe I need to go deep down into programming, but I am not sure. If any of you could help me and give me a little push so I can get this done, I'd be very grateful to you.

I made the basic conversion from F to C from one of the NI tutorials.

Hope my explanation wasn't too difficult to understand. Also, I am using LabView 2015.

Thank you a lot in advance and have a nice day!

[crossrulz · Accepted solution]

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@notanengineeryet wrote:
but I cannot seem to find a way to connect two wires to one thermometer (by doing two different arithmetical operations)

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So you want two sources to go into a single indicator?  That you cannot do.  Only one node can be a source on a wire.  So the better question would be why do you need multiple sources?  Which source should be displayed when?  It could be a simple adding of a Select? function with a button or an enum controlling a case structure whose output is wired to the indicator.

And since you are new...

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[GerdW · Accepted solution]

Hi yet,

which "thermometer" do you want to use twice?

General rule: LabVIEW follows the main mantra of THINK DATAFLOW!. Each data sink (=indicator/local variable) can only have one data source (wire!) connected.

Additional suggestions:

- For each thermometer control/indicator you can show a "digital display" with just a right-click. This way you can reduce your block diagram size quite a lot.

- Using AutoCleanup (Ctrl-U) from time to time would be nice too!

- Placing related controls and indicators on the frontpanel next to each other helps to understand your VI too…

[notanengineeryet]

Thank you a lot for taking time and replying to my problem. And sorry for the late reply. I just wanted to see if I could do the conversion two way for each of the measurement units, it is not a mandatory thing, so I won't be digging into it too much ... it was just a fun task I tried to do, but I will not go further into it. 

Also, lots of thanks for the links, will access each one of them!

[notanengineeryet]

Hi there, thank you for replying to my post.

I wanted to use each of the thermometers two times, but I see that it is not possible, so I won't be getting too into it because I just wanted to try some things and see how they work in labview, but this is not the field I need to learn how to work with labview.

Also, lots of thanks for your suggestions!

[RTSLVU]

You need to read about and learn to use the case structure and Enumerated Type.Def. (Enum)

For this program I would envision an Enum to select the "input units" and another one to select the "output units".

Then use these two selections to drive a case that selects the proper formula to make the conversion.