Visualization of captured data

[LievenD]

Hi all,

I am just wondering what would be the best way of visualizing and maybe doing calculations (integral of speed for example to get distance) of historical data.   I am currently using a lot of LabVIEW applications during testing that generates a lot of data.  Currently we are writing this data on a CAN line.  An external SOMAT EDAQ then captures this data and we use Infield to look at our data and print graphs and so on. 

Now I am thinking that National Instruments must have its own software for visualizing historical data and printing graphs and so on or do we have to design our own application with LABVIEW?  Is there any data format you can write to in LabVIEW (LVM or TDMS ?) and then another National Instruments software package that is easy to use for data visualization?

Thanks & regards,

Lieven

[DFGray]

National Instruments sells DIAdem to analyse and visualize data sets.  Check out this link for more information and a free trial.

If you use DIAdem, TDMS is probably your best bet for data storage from LabVIEW.  DIAdem supports a plethora of other file formats, however, so things such as tab-separated text (e.g. LVM) are also good.

[josborne02]

I am very interested in this topic, also (kudos to you!).  But I'd be curious if there are any other solutions out there besides Diadem.

For example, are than any solutions (e.g. from other vendors) that do NOT rely on a proprietary file format like TDMS?  I am very keen on storing data in relational databases and would love a data visualization solution that can easily retreieve data through a standard ODBC interface.

[josborne]

Also see this suggestion for another reason I am not yet sold on Diadem:

http://forums.ni.com/t5/DIAdem-Idea-Exchange/Create-a-web-based-DIADem-client/idi-p/1455328

[Chris V · Accepted solution]

Hi LievenD,

If you want to view TDMS files (which I would recommend), you have two options:

1) Make a LabVIEW program.  This is very trivial though.  I attached a VI that pulls out the data in two different ways and as you can see it only has four functions.

2) You can view all of the data in Microsoft Excel using this add-on: TDM Excel Add-In For Microsoft Excel Download

Have a great day,

Chris V

[StefanR]

Well, maybe there's a misunderstanding...

DIAdem is not limited to TDMS. DIAdem can load several hundreds of file formats by using DataPlugins (ni.com/dataplugins), there's even one to read SOMAT SIF files.

Furthermore DIAdem is able to access a variety of CAN files using the CAN Converter.

Also an interface to deal with ODBC is available.

[josborne]

Thanks for the correction.  I didn't realize that plugins could be used with Diadem.

I guess my immediate thought is:  How easy is the integration?  Does it require much programming (besides SQL queries) to implement an interface to an ODBC database?

I'll have to look into this more closely.  Maybe even request a Diadem demo from an NI sales engineer ... or try it out at NIWeek or somthing.

[LievenD]

Thanks for the reply Stefan that sounds very interesting indeed, especially if we can read SIF files with it too.

I guess I'll start playing with the TDMS file format.  I have managed to write some data in an application that I am programming for an upcoming project.

Once I have the project running I'll start data logging for a few days and then download the trial version of DIAdem to test its functionality.

Thanks for the reply everybody. It's been a great help.