vi logger new features

[viScience]

I would like to get information on the planned roadmap for future versions of VI Logger. When is the next release planned? Were there any new features in the LV8.2 release? We are using VI Logger standalone and also via LV interfaces and have found it useful but limited. I would especially like to see a way of reading data from visa instruments and having it merge with the DAQmx data. It would also be nice if the user interface were more responsive, for example deleting data records takes a fantastically long time. Thanks, Mike Sachs Intelligent Systems

[Efosa O.]

Mike hello and thanks a lot for your post.

What version of VI Logger are you using? To my knowledge, I am not aware of any major changes that came with LabVIEW 8.20. VI Logger is a separate software package handled by an entirely different team.

As far as road-maps to where VI Logger is going, or when the next version will be released, all that is privileged information (so privileged I do not even know when that would be.)

As per your request to be able to merge DAQmx data and VISA instruments data, could you possibly expound on that? Are you using LabVIEW at all or just VI Logger?

Lastly, you can always post a product suggestion at ni.com and our R&D engineers will definitely take a look at it.

Thanks a lot
Efosa O.

[viScience]

Hi - thanks for your reply, I am primarily a labview developer, but lately at a client company, I have been promoting the deployment of standlone vi logger systems to do large channel count thermocouple measurements. Now that folks are happy with the utility of vi logger in these applications they are asking to be able to merge data from various VISA instruments such as RS232 balance scales, humidity sensors, temperature baths, etc. I now am writing Labview code to take in these VISA data points and timestamp them so that they can be correlated with the vi logger data. It would be much more elegant to be able to feed this data directly into vi logger. The only viable way I have found is to write a LV "server" that will read in the VISA data and republish it to analog outputs that are looped back as analog inputs, not very pretty. I also tried to create fake analog channels and programmatically modify their MAX scaling so that I could drive the Global Channel to the value that was last read by any particular instrument. This actually would work within the same LV environment but alas changing MAX scale parameters in LV does not propagate to a running vi logger task. (I was feeling so clever, until it didn't work) Now it has become a personal thing, I just can't believe there is not a way to get it to work. Any ideas? Remote DAQ channels? OPC populated data socket variables, shared variables? Hidden vi logger API interface? Beta versions of the next release of vi logger?

[Justin D]

There's no way to do this in VI Logger.  If you used SignalExpress you could get data from both DAQmx and IVI compliant Scopes and DMM's.  That's about all you can do without writing a custom LabVIEW application.  You might want to use VI Logger to generate LabVIEW code for your task and then add the extra VISA parts into this VI.

Hope this helps,
Justin D
Applications Engineer
National Instruments