07-04-2018 04:12 AM
Dear all,
I am interfacing an Agilent 54830B Oscilloscope with LabVIEW 2015 in order to produce an Excel output of the time vs amplitude data and a picture of the graph displayed on the oscilloscope. I am a beginner in LabVIEW and therefore took things one stage at a time. I firstly used the Simulate Signal VI to generate a sine wave in LabVIEW to establish how to export the waveform data and a picture of the waveform to Excel. This was mostly successful apart from the ‘Time Format String’ associated with the Format Data/Time String VI failed to display the date and time in the way I had intended but I figured I would sort that out later (this was not a major problem). I then went on to download the drivers for the specific oscilloscope and wrote a LabVIEW program to test communication between LabVIEW and the oscilloscope. This worked and the graph on the user interface showed the waveform on the oscilloscope. However, when I combined these two programs and tried to run it, initially an Excel document would appear with no data but with a picture of the waveform. This would quickly disappear and be replaced by an error message. I have attached a screenshot of this error message and also the VI in which the error occurs. I have tried searching the error code but have found nothing. Can anybody see what is wrong and what I need to change?
Thank you in advance
07-04-2018 08:40 AM
You are using an Express VI, which does "who-knows-what" under the covers. I recommend learning enough LabVIEW to avoid these "crutches" whenever reasonable.
When considering Date/Time formats, there is a basic difference between how LabVIEW handles (and saves) TimeStamps (basically as seconds since 1 Jan 1904) and how Excel does this (as days since 1 Jan 1900, except they forgot that 1900 isn't a Leap Year, but that only messes up dates before 1 Mar 1900, not such a Major Microsoft Error, I guess ...).
Bob Schor