I use LabView for monitoring chemical reactors and automating such things as valve switches. The reactors my company typically orders come from an instrument manufacturer that uses Honeywell controllers, and which run SpecView to monitor and log temperatures, pressures, flow rates, etc. I recently added some instrumentation to one of these reactors and used an NI DAQ board and LabView to monitor and control the new instrumentation, and I will likely do the same with some other reactors in the near future. Some of the Honeywell controllers are integral to the reactor and I don't think I can decouple them from SpecView. I would like to be able to at least read online measurements into LabView, by communicating with SpecView from LabView, and preferably I'd like to be able to write setpoints to SpecView from LabView as well. I believe the version of SpecView we have runs a "modbus" protocol for information exchange, and I've found some information online that suggests that some kind of "OPC" server may be able to facilitate these communications, but I'm not much of a software guy. Can anyone point me in the right direction here? Is the "Data Socket Server" of use for making this communication link? Thanks.
