LabVIEW
Need help with school project (This is not an honor code violation)
Hey, so I just created an account here. Before I get a flood of comments, let me answer some basic ones:
1. My team asks my professor for help with this constantly, and he usually shrugs his shoulders and says: "Yeah I don't really know HOW to do that but THIS is what you gotta do somehow." -- aka not helpful.
2. This is not a violation of any honor code. I am not asking for anyone to do my school project for me, I am simply asking for some basic guidance and labview tutoring from labview experts. This is the best place I know to do that.
3. I wish my school had a labview class or something that actually could help me prepare for the kind of project I am doing, but alas, we all kind of just get thrown into this with little more than a crash course in how to make a basic GUI.
Now, to begin:
I am working in a team of 3 to create a data collection system using arduino and labview. The project consists of creating a robust 3D-printed shell for electrical components, creating an electrical system that can collect the data we need, managing that data with labview through a publishing/subscribing strategy using the arduino mac address, and creating a "professional" GUI with labview that makes the collected data very clear and easy to read/navigate.
Problem: None of us have ever used labview before, I have the hardest professor for the class, and we have roughly 3 weeks before we gotta have our deliverable product.
We will be collecting humidity, light, and temperature data with the arduino.
Questions:
1. We need to figure out how to send data from a server directly to an excel spreadsheet file. Where do we even begin with this? Again, my professor offers no help besides: "Yeah, you have to retrieve the data from the server and somehow store it in excel." -- how do we do this? Is there any tutorials you guys know of that explain how one could take data in labview and automatically send it into an excel file?
2. We need to figure out how to display data based on a specific selection like: "temperature from 8-9 pm Thursday + 7-9 am Friday." Again, is there anything out there that can help me better understand how one might do something like that? Would it be smartest to try to retrieve that data back from excel somehow and graph it, or is there a better approach?
These are the two most pressing things for us right now. I'm sorry if my questions seem very vague--I'm not even sure what I am supposed to ask or what terms I can use to make the questions clearer, as I literally barely even know how to make a button light up in labview lol.
ANY help is appreciated. ANY re-directions to helpful tutorials in something like this would be appreciated. I basically just need to learn labview well and very fast, as my professor isn't giving us any VI's to copy like other class sections are getting--We gotta do things from scratch, and I barely know where to start.
Thank you!
P.S. Pray for the grades of everyone in my class 
1. Along with the TDMS option, there's the Write To Spreadsheet File VI, which will save the data in a CSV file and which Excel can open natively. TDMS is a better approach, but a plain old CSV might be simpler to understand and debug (it's just a text file after all). One option for logging would be to log one row per data record, with columns for timestamp, humidity, light, and temperature.
2. This data will need to be stored somewhere (TDMS or CSV). You can then read the timestamps and data from the file, and then search the timestamps for the appropriate time range to graph.
Check out the Example Finder that comes with LabVIEW (under Help -> Find Examples...)
