suggestions/opinions on 'multi-nodal' data acquisition

[plyons.gks]

Hello fellow LabVIEWers,

I've been perusing these forums for a little bit and have come to really appreciate the amount of significant know-how that is present here.  Which is why I'd like to ask for your opinion or maybe a simple/quick 'assessment' of how I'd like to implement LabVIEW.

My objective is as follows:

Find an economical way to acquire data from multiple "stations" (most including a simple LV HMI for the user at the station) and display data (from all stations) at a 'cockpit' or 'master station' running a LV program.

At this point I'm willing to generalize-

About 5 stations or so each with lets say 5 variables of interest.

I'm thinking I can basically have the master station be a standard desktop with gigabit ethernet connected to a wireless router.

Each station could consist of a netbook with a USB DAQ and wireless (either g or n) connectivity.

so,

what do you think of a multi-unicast (kinda like multi-broadcast I guess) network made up of multiple netbooks uploading  data to the master station?

I have no experience with LabVIEW's networking capabilities, so I don't know if this would involve setting up shared variables or if it would be as simple as dumping read values into a UDP or TCP vi arrangement. 

Thanks for the time and I appreciate any info or suggestions!!!

-Pat

[The_Chancenator]

Hi Pat,

We'll go ahead and call the "cockpit" computer the host and the other data acquisiton stations "clients". 

Before you get into the specifics of the networking, what kind of data acquisition are you hoping to do?  If it is a simple application, for example you are just reading voltage into a DAQ card, then you would be able to use wireless DAQ: http://www.ni.com/dataacquisition/wifi/ With the wireless DAQ you'd be able to retrieve the data from the wireless DAQ node to the host computer very easily. 

If you need a VI run on the client computer, then your options change a little.  You will need something to run the VI- for example a cRIO, Fieldpoint, or something of that sort.  You'd then be able to connect over the network to these targets and gather the data in this manner. 

Which of these more describes your application?  Or, if it is neither, could you give me some more information about the application?

Cheers!

[Antoine2g]

Greetings

I am using LabVIEW version 7.1 with a National Instruments PCI-6713 12bit.

I am not at all familiar with the LabVIEW program.

Can anybody please provide a (simple) voltage data acquisition software?

It will be used to obtain data from some brand new Kistler pressure sensors for a Research Project.

One or two channel does not matter - if one I will use one pressure sensor at a time.

Grateful for any assistance; ofcourse recognition will be possible in any acknowledgements and/or publications if desired...

[Dennis_Knutson]

duplicate post

Do NOT post the same question multiple times and stop hijacking unrelated threads.