Simple VI for old gas analyser

[Bob_Schor]

Welcome back, Ben.  It's good you plan to learn more about your "tools" (see Jeff Bohrer's last post), including LabVIEW, before jumping in to this Project.

At some point reasonably soon (like yesterday), consider creating a document describing, as completely as reasonable, your requirements and goals.  Describe your inputs and outputs, the kind of controls and indicators you will need, make mention of the existing hardware to which you need to connect, and the hardware that will connect to your PC (sometimes these are the same, sometimes hardware connects to hardware).  Specify channel count, voltage ranges, sampling rates, timing considerations/constraints.

Are you designing a purely "control" system, or are you creating something that also save/records data?  If the latter, what are the requirements for the data format(s)?

It is definitely a Good Idea to make use of as many existing tools as practical to avoid reinventing the Wheel.  Still, with a new system, it may turn out that a new Top Level Design to handle the Big Picture, with sub-systems using vendor-provided software, will provide the best approach.  Seeing all the pieces should help clarify how to proceed.

Bob Schor

[Simon-lee]

Hi Bob,

While I totally agree that “complete overview” method of experiment design would be the ideal approach, unfortunately this project is classified as a Technology development program which really means we don’t know what the final shape will be.

The laboratory involvement request is populated with only the broadest of brush strokes and even as I write there is an ISO committee trying to agree the finer points of the problem.

Traditionally the level of detail you describe only appears in the qualification program. (mad but true)  Getting back to the problem we start out with the simplest test stand that’s feasible and bolt on complexity as required.

Because this is chemistry and by nature quite slow (fast chemistry is possible but tends to lead to a rather big bangs an no eyebrows) human control can prove very successful, electronics are great but I have to work within its limitations, consider for a minute a gas streams at elevated temperature and corrosive a simple valve will beat a MFC every time.

When control is required I tend to favour West PID’s for control and Millenium PLC’s for safety systems (I know its old tech it works + simple and dumb make the risk assessments a lot easier)

The software’s primary function is to acquire, manipulate, display and record. Dasylab is very good but has some restrictions and I was hoping LabView might offer some advantage but the learning curve is far too steep for this project.

Thanks for you Input

Kind Regards

Ben

[CJ_Butler__DASYLab_Pro]

And of course, we're more than happy to help you with DASYLab. It supports National Instruments devices that are supported by NI-DAQmx.

If you get a newer device, you may need to update your DASYLab license to DASYLab 13 to take advantage of changes in the DASYLab drivers for NI-DAQmx.

The DASYLab forum is listed under Other Software.

You can also request assistance directly by going to Measurement Computing web site:  www.mccdaq.com.

[Simon-lee]

Thank you I was genuinely unaware of that, I will be contacting you directly in the very near future

Kind regards

Ben