How to simplify opening/closing Excel to grab data from LabView based software running outside the main VI

[Dominic Maertens]

Hi,

Right now I have a program written to automate an AOP pilot with a few inputs and outputs (3 valves, ozone generator, UV lamp, TOC meter, ozone meter in liquid and gas phase, and a UV-VIS detector). The valves are controlled with digital outputs, the rest are analog in- an outputs going into a USB-6009. The one exception is the UV-VIS detector (S::CAN Spectro::lyser). We read in about 200 Abs/m values with their corresponding wavelengths. The software of this tool is ran on the same computer and it writes down these values in an Excel file (.fp). My VI needs to select this excel file while running, and grabs the corresponding data from the Excel file. I made a finetuner to select the latest data from the excel file. Now, even though this works, it's not practical for many reasons. It closes all other excel files while running for example, and opens and closes Excel twice in 30 seconds.

I found out the software of the UV-VIS detector is written in LabView too, but the company doesn't seem to care much about sharing the original VI's or making it complementary with other LabView VI's. Now I was wondering if there's an easier solution than opening/closing Excel. Are global variables an option for this problem? I'm far from an expect in LabView, so I just want to know if I should put in the time to learn about global variables or not 🙂

Thanks in advance.

Dominic

[ThiCop]

Hello Dominic,

Do you have any of the UV-VIS detector code available?

Is there a specific reason why you are planning to use global variables?

Can you share the code you are currently using so that I can take a look at it and search for possible improvements?

[ThiCop]

Hello Dominic,

Did you receive a notification of my post?

[adanali]

hello dominic;

I have read your study about AOP recently and I wonder your Labview VI. Can you share the code you used with me?

kind regards,

Dr. Baris OZLUOYMAK
Electrical and Electronics Engineer (MSc)
University of Cukurova, Faculty of Agriculture,
Department of Agricultural Machinery,
01330 Adana / TURKEY
Tel: 90 322 3386408
Fax: 90 322 3387165
E-mail: ozluoymak@cu.edu.tr