I was handed over a project that uses NI hardware and I am in the process of learning if there is a better architecture for our system that is in place. The hardware is a mix of WSN gateways and nodes, and CompactRIO units. Our setup consists of the following.
The previous project lead wrote a LabVIEW piece of software that runs on the gateways and compactRIO units that collects readings and then sends it to a server. He mentioned that it uses the real time module as well. The server address and port are specified in a text config file that is on the unit. If the unit loses network connection, data is stored locally until network connectivity is restored.
A windows service written in C# listens for a connection and accepts data from the units. This is just a string of text saying which node it came from, the value, time taken, and some other bits of information. Then it looks at the data and determines if it should be counted as a warning or error and sends an alert. There is several parameters to what makes a measurement count as a warning and error and I want this logic to reside in server side software.
I imagined that reading measurements from a sensor and then inserting it into a database is an extremely common scenario. I would think that there would be software that does this automatically. Because I am very unfamiliar with the software provided by NI, perhaps it does exist and I just don’t know about it. Our existing windows service is somewhat unreliable and I want to add additional features to it.
My ideal setup would be software that runs on the server and collects data from the sensors. It outputs it via some form, maybe text file or an API. Then I can take that measurement and insert it into the database with the appropriate status and other row fields. I also need the ability for a person to change parameters of the sensors such as sampling rate. I know you can configure sampling rate already in a NI piece of software, but I would like to do it via a web application.
Because I am familiar with the .NET stack, I found Measurement Studio compelling. Would it allow me to:
- View real-time data measurements from WSN and CompactRIO units?
- Modify the sensor parameters such as sample rate, etc.
Also, is there a piece of software similar to the windows service I described that collects data and outputs it from another applications use?
