Driver for PTW Unidos Webline Universal Dosemeter

[Joshua38]

I am trying to automate a PTW Unidos Webline dosemeter. The PTW commands are not SCPI so I am having some trouble. Does anyone have advice for developing a driver and/or formatting commands for this type of instrument? 

[jonathanadalin]

Have you taken a look at this tutorial on developing LabVIEW instrument drivers? 

[Joshua38]

Thank you. I will be sure to spend some more time with this tutorial. For starters, I've been following this advice from the tutorial: "The template VIs contain instructions for modifying the VIs for a particular instrument. Use the template VIs with both message-based instruments (GPIB, VXI, and serial) and VXI register-based instruments. Because the templates were designed for IEEE 488.2 compatible instruments, minimal modifications are needed for IEEE 488.2 compliant instruments. For other instruments, use the template VIs as a shell or pattern for your VIs by substituting your instrument-specific commands where applicable." However, when I substitute the instrument-specific commands I get errors (or no response) and I suspect their may be a formatting issue, so I'm looking for someone familiar with PTW's communication protocols who may be able to offer some suggestions. 

[jonathanadalin]

Unfortunately, I'm not very familiar with the PTW (protected tactical waveform?) protocol. I can look into it to see what I learn, but I hope that for now that tutorial pointed you in the right direction. 

[Joshua38]

Thanks for your help. PTW is the German company that manufactures the Unidos Webline electrometer/dosimeter. I'm not sure what the letters stand for. 

[MartyCarts]

Joshua38, I'm playing with the PTW Romeo now.  Its manuals says a few pertinent things:  UT8, command termination is <CR> plus <LF>, default address is 169.254.213.163, and to Telnet on port 8123.  No success yet, tho.  Error 59, “The network is down, unreachable, or has been reset”. I suspect it's something particularly obvious but like you I'm trying to skate through w/o really understanding.  This is my cummupance, sigh.  

There's a 2011 paper, "Automation of Radiation Dosimetry Using PTW Dosemeter(sic) and LabVIEW(TM)" but they give no actual useful (to me) information. No PTW devices on the ni website.

Anyone done this recently?

[Loucoume]

Hello Marty,

I have the same requirement for a software, did you succeed to write some drivers for the PtW Unidos ?

I will write some myself with UDP protocole. some thing very basic at first, only retrieving the measurements, but then I will complete them for the configuration of the device.

Regards

[MartyCarts]

Hi Loucoume, 

I'm a bit of a hack (in an older, less self-aggrandizing sense).  I wrote a set of sub .vis (and the overarching program) but I didn't write a driver per se.  We need to reliably synchronize our probes across a few Romeos and the program enables that. 

I remember struggling with communicating with the Romeo, and also the fact that you cannot tell a Romeo what a GUID is; it seems each Romeo has to generate the GUIDs for all the probes it uses.  So that means to copy a new probe to a Romeo the Romeo has to create a probe, and then you write the probe structure into that.  

I can revisit the program to help you if you'd like; I have no idea whether my work is sharable or not. 

Ciao