grab screen text window

[Hans Blom]

Hi all,

I'm pretty new to LabView and in need of some pointers.

A user program presents a number in a small text window on the screen
every 50 milliseconds. It does not have the ability to store these
numbers into a file or draw a graph, which is basically what I need. Is
there a possibility in Labview to grab the number (a 4 digit integer)
off the screen every 50 milliseconds?

An alternative might be a hack where I periodically acquire a number
from (another program's) memory. I run Windows98SE.

Sounds familiar? I appreciate any help.

Greetings,

Hans

[Jeremy Braden]

I do not think this is going to be possible or worth the effort. If the only interface you have with the program is the information on the screen, then there is not going to be a way to get this info into LabVIEW. (you might take a screen shot, and use OCR to read the values). Your other option, as you mentioned, is to read the value directly from memory. I have no skills in this area but this is how video game hacks are done. You might be able to learn how to do this on the web and put those tools to use to find the memory location for the data.

[Greg_McKaskle2]

> A user program presents a number in a small text window on the screen
> every 50 milliseconds. It does not have the ability to store these
> numbers into a file or draw a graph, which is basically what I need. Is
> there a possibility in Labview to grab the number (a 4 digit integer)
> off the screen every 50 milliseconds?
>

From the description, it sounds like this might be a shell program, or
a DOS program. If this is the case, you might be able to redirect the
output to an output file using the >> or | notation on the command line.
If not, look for additional parameters that will give an alternate
output. If not, my advice would be to dump it and redo the computation
in something else, perhaps LV.

Greg McKaskle