What is the best way to stream data from a C-Program to a LabVIEW VI?

[s_bohn]

Dear Community,

I'm currently working on a project where I'm programming a device control with LabVIEW. A colleague of mine is programming some image analysis with C, where he calculates about 3 paramateres per image every ~30 ms.

Now we want to use these parameters in my VI.
So the idea was to continuously wirte the parameters with the C-Program to a file and simultaneously read from that file with my LabVIEW VI.

For performance reasons the C-Program and LabVIEW VI are running on two different PCs.

My first idea was to use a TDMS file in a shared directory. But after my first tries with TDMS I have some doubts if this is the best solution, because I had some trouble while testing with an .exe to write some TDMS files and simultaneously reading it.
So I just want to ask if you guys know a better solution for our problem?

[Taki1999]

I don't think using files is going to be the best way to go here.

I think you probably want to use something like a Network Shared Variable.

[nanocyte · Accepted solution]

Is there a C interface for shared variables?

TCP is a very good option. STM provides a good template to follow for an implementation. There's even a C client

[Taki1999]

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@nanocyte wrote:

Is there a C interface for shared variables?

...

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According to the whitepaper that I linked:

"In addition, with the Network Variable Library introducted in NI LabWindows/CVI 8.1 and NI Measurement Studio 8.1, you can read and write to shared variables in ANSI C, Visual Basic .NET or Visual C#."

I haven't used the ANSI C interface to Measurement Studio myself. Should be pretty straightforward though.

[Kyle97330]

As a possible way to make it simpler, you could use LabVIEW to build a DLL that accesses the shared variable instead of making your C programmer wade through a new API.

[s_bohn]

Thank you all guys,

I think just using TCP will be the best solution for me.