TestStand Use Case - Burn-in Chamber

[gohawks12]

Hi,

I have an application where I want to place a UUT into a thermal chamber and continuously provide stimulus to it while continuously monitoring/recording its behavior.  The chamber will also need to be controlled throughout the test.  This test can run continuously for several days and possibly weeks.

I would like to have the data constantly be displayed on a GUI as well and recording the data.  I have never seen a TestStand program that did this.  I'm only familiar with TestStand performing sequential tests and not continuous control and monitoring.

My question is, would this application be suitable for TestStand or  should I just use LabVIEW?

I would prefer to have all the controls and graph/chart displays in one GUI and not have a whole bunch of pop up windows.  Can this be accomplished with TestStand?

Thank you

[santo_13]

As you might be already aware, TestStand is a Sequencer, which means, it allows you to order a sequence of operations interactively, where each operation is already implemented using as a code module using another ADE like LabVIEW, LabWindows, .NET etc.,

TestStand gives you the flexibility to call whatever you want in the order you want. But it does not know anything about what your called module does.

You can implement continuous control and monitoring inside the code module and have a UI there.

In short, you might be good with LV based standalone applications but it "Depends" on what you want to achieve - like modularity, flexibility, scalability etc.,

[Oli_Wachno]

You might want to look in the topic of UI messages. 

They are part of the TestStand API and implemented to notify a OI / GUI of (custom) events including data.

You could also use data streaming step types to export / amend data to a csv File while test is running if data amount is very extensive.

But that's just to be seen as a plan B solution, since it brings some caveats.