Best way of displaying many waveform graphs

[Pladio]

Hello again,

I'm currently running a Producer Consumer loop on acquiring many channels from a NI-USB-6259. I am trying to show a waveform graph for each channel and I'm currently limiting myself to 4 channels, but I should be able to acquire up to 60 channels in the end. I do know that the 6259 does not really have the capability for that, but other NI hardware would be used once it's needed and working.

The problem I have is that if I want to add all 60 channels, the block diagram gets very messy as I need to add a block for each graph. I also have to select the correct channel, since I acquire everything and every row of the 2D array represents one channel. 

For now I'm doing what is shown on the image.

I was wondering if there's a better way of doing this. 

In addition to all of this, I was hoping I could change the scales and other parameters for all waveform graphs at the same time.

And finally, I was hoping to be able to double click (or something similar) to enlarge just one of the graphs (but that's for later 🙂 )

Thanks,

David.

[Akiel]

whats the application?

I would consider a method of only displaying the channels i am interested in not all 60. I have a similar problem at the moment and I have opted for some buttons that when pressed (they latch) will display a subvi front panel. and when pressed again close the front panel. Wether this is suitable would depend on you application

[Pladio]

Hi Akiel, (Weren't you TD before ?)

Application is the acquisition of signals from a multieclectrode array which has a culture of neurons on it. So it would be quite useful to see all channels at once if the person using the software wants to, but then it would be nice to look particularly at one or two channels individually at times as well.

I thought putting up all 60 would be the easiest thing to start with. Adding more functionality as I go along. you don't think so ?

See the image attached. It would be like that (a bit better formatted) but with 60 channels 8 by 8 without the corners.

The idea is to see the action potentials of the neurons.

David.

[Akiel]

I was TD yep.

by all means display your data like that (i did) then added more and more functionality and control as I became more confident and also got ideas of what LV is capable of i then changed my front panel to be much more readable but experiment there will be a good solution for your application 

[Pladio]

Any ideas for me to try ?

I was thinking of a for loop, but I thought this might create an unnecessary delay. 

[Akiel]

I would check your producer/consumer architecture, it should run idefinatly until a stop condition is reached  (example stop being pressed)

check http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/3023

so the producer would read the card every n ms maybe getting all the channels and plaing on the queue and at the same time your consumer would be displaying the data. In the background your cards would be continuously sampling. 

[Pladio]

Yes, that's not a problem. That's working. While I know that the display of data won't be real-time. I don't want to add unnecessary delays, just because "it doesn't look good" to have 60 waveform graph icons on the block diagram.

Oh well, I'll try a few things out this afternoon. Hopefully I can get something to work somewhate better.

If you get an idea on the original question, please let me know 🙂

[Akiel]

I would experiment a bit. if performance is a problem then there are a number of good articles  on optimising labview code also use the vi analyser on the tools menu. it will highlight some issues that will affect performance as well as a number of other issues that are good practice, let us know how it goes and if need be we can help you