parallel measurement and control

[thofufish]

I am planning LabView control and measurement application for gas sensing tests. I am not sure whether to use one single VI (master slave design with queueing system and event handlers: like in the "Data Aquisition Reference Design" project) for control and measurement or using several independent VIs instead.

The following tasks have to be controlled:

- Gas flow and gas composition via 4 mass flow controllers (Aera ROD-4 controller, Serial Port via USB)

- Sensor temperature: power supply contolled via NI-USB-6009 (analog output)

- 5 gas valves: power supply contolled via NI-USB-6009 (digital output)

The following measurements have to be made:

- actual gas flow (Aera ROD-4, Serial Port via USB)

- I-V characteristics of the sensor (Keithley 2400 SourceMeter, GPIB via USB)

- 2x temperature measurement using Pt1000 thermometers (Keithley 2700 Multimeter, GPIB via USB)

The timingis not a very crucial task, as the measurements have to be taken every second. I planned to realize the temperature control using the built in PID functions, which require a faster updating (50-100ms).

I wanted to save all control and measurement parameters every second in a tdms file.

As the measurements are running for several hours, I do need a stable and reliable measuremnet and control system. Which program design would be best suited for this task? I appreciate your comments and your experience.

Thanks,

Thomas

[HoussamK]

Hi,

the Producer/Consumer pattern gives you the ability to easily handle multiple processes at the same time while iterating at individual rates. What makes this pattern unique is its added benefit of buffered communication between application processes. When there are multiple processes running at different speeds, buffered communication between processes is extremely effective.

Using Producer/Consumer Architecture for DAQmx Read and Write to File This example program uses the Producer / Consumer parallel-loop architecture to acquire data using DAQmx and write that data to a file.

Producer/Consumer pattern :: Read Double data from a device and write these data to TDMS file at two...