Should I move up to Labview?

[UserUserUser]

Hi folks,

Beginner user, I'm trying to figure out if it's worth my time to try DAQExpress for my application or just buy Labview and get more functionality.

My application: ~15 x digital 4-20mA inputs are coming into two DAQ modules I've purchased. These are a combination of temperature, pressure, and flowrate sensors. I want to hit "start" to simultaneously start recording all of these values, and write them to an excel file. If I have 5 samples a second (or even 1/s), that's fine. I do not need to control anything. I want also to develop my basic panel to display live readings of these values during the experiment, and also do a kind of visual/audio alarm if values are out of a specified range during the experiment (but not interrupt anything).

This is a basic research system, and I want to be as time-saving as possible so if getting labview saves me 2 full days of time it would be worth it. Also want to consider that we'll want to upgrade to more complex capabilities or even controls in the months/years to come.

Thanks!

[oscarfonseca · Accepted solution]

A bit late to the conversation, but here are my two cents:

DAQExpress will be a good option to record the data, if your hardware is supported. Another option you have is FlexLogger, which will give you more control in the data logging and will be easier to setup and get going than having to develop a LabVIEW program.

However, if you do expect the application to grow to include more functionality, I advise starting from LabVIEW NXG.

All the best,

[UserUserUser]

Thank you for the reply. I ended up just going with the full Labview, to your point we do expect to upgrade functionality and transition from just collecting sensor inputs to moving into control loops.

Also (and maybe this is feedback for NI), it is time-consuming and unclear to me exactly what kind of system setup you can run on these reduced-feature systems like FlexLogger and DAQExpress. There's some documentation but it's too general to really make a confident decision, which is why I just went for Labview NXG. Maybe that's better for NI 😉

Thanks again Oscar.