I want to include everything in my sub vi.

[ASH2020]

Hey, thanks Bob. I like the sound of the termination character but I'm afraid the packet structure put together by the hardware at the other end doesn't include termination characters. However, the packet length is always the same, regardless of how full of data it is. If I request data faster, it just means there's less data and a lot of padding in the packet.

In an ideal world, I agree, it would be lovely to design it properly in a "top down" approach. However, in this instance, there are 2 of us, 600 miles apart, one doing the Forth that sends the data and me doing the Labview that captures the data and manipulates and displays it in the GUI. There is no spec, it changes as we go along and as we get things to work, little by little. It's a pretty horrible way of working and ultimately takes far longer and leads to really messy code. Also, some of the sub vis I am using have been written by someone else and have to be changed slightly sometimes. I'm not saying its the best way to work, but I like having a screen full, where I can follow things by scrolling, rather than drilling down in the other direction, into the sub vis.

Cheers

Andrew

[Bob_Schor]

If you are 600 miles apart, can't you use TCP/IP as the method of transferring data?  One routine that I "inherited" used PCs on a local subnet, but data were passed back and forth using FTP (not ideal) and TCP -- when we "redid" it using "Modern LabVIEW", I used Network Streams (both machines were running LabVIEW), which made for very nice bi-directional communications (one Message Channel in each direction, plus some one-way Data Channels).

Bob Schor

[ASH2020]

Sorry, I didn't make it clear, the 2 ends of the equipment aren't 600 miles apart, just the development effort 🙂