LabVIEW + National Instruments equipment or ???

Question

I participate in the processes of buying a new data collection system for my company for use in various projects. At first, the main task will be monitoring up to 20 thermocouples and controlling the temperature of the composite furnace. However, I also plan to use it to monitor accelerometers, strain gauges and to work as a signal generator.

I probably won’t use it, but I have good programming experience with Atmel (C) microcontrollers. I used to use LabVIEW, but ~ 5 years ago. LabVIEW would be good because it’s easy to pick for me and my colleagues. On the other hand, it is expensive. Right now I have a NI CompactDAQ system with two voltages and one thermocouple + LabVIEW card, and it will cost $ 5,779.

I will try to get the same I / O capabilities with different NI hardware for less than $ + LabVIEW to find out if I can get it for less than $. I would like to see if anyone has any suggestions other than LabVIEW.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Welcome to test and measurement. It is quite expensive for pre-prepared material, but you are trading money.

You can check out the slightly less expensive Agilent 34970A (and related cards). This is a great workhorse for different types of perception, and, if I remember correctly, it comes with basic software.

For simple temperature control, you can consider the PID controller ( Watlow , and Omega are brands, but it has been several years since I looked at them).

You can also check out NI's low-cost USB solutions . The number of channels is lower, but they are quite inexpensive. However, they still need some kind of software.

There are also a large number of good small companies (such as Hytek Automation ) that manufacture some types of metering and control devices or subnets, but YMMV.

Answer 2

There are many misconceptions about what will and will not work with LabView, and what you do, and you do not need to build a decent system with it.

First of all, as others have said, testing and measuring the road. No matter what you end up doing, the system you describe will cost thousands.

Secondly, you do not need to use NI equipment with LabView. For thermocouples, it is best to look at multi-channel or several single-channel thermocouple blocks - something that is read from a thermocouple and output to something like RS-232, etc. Examples are OMEGABUS Digital Transmitters, but many others exist.

Thus, you only need a breakthrough card with a large number of RS-232 ports, and you can develop your system as you wish. You can still use labview to receive data through RS-232, and then display, register, process, etc., but you like it.

Third-party signal generators will also work, for example. You can pick up the good ones (with GPIB connection) reasonably cheaply, and the GPIB can also integrate it into LabView. This is if you want something like a function generator, of course (pulses with cyclic loading, standard sine / triangle / ramp functions, etc.). If you are talking about generating an arbitrary signal, then this remains a rather expensive task (if $ 5,000 is our goal for the "expensive").

It also depends on what you need to generate the signal - if you are thinking about pilot signals, then again there may be cheaper and more reliable opitons. For temperature control, for example, separate hardware PID controllers are preferred. This will also take care of your thermocouple problem, since PID controllers usually also accept thermocouple inputs. Thus, you only need one interface (for example, RS-232) for an external PID controller, and you have full access to the temperature readings in LabView, as well as the ability to control the settings and PID parameters in one unit.

Perhaps if you could develop not only the system components as you currently planned, but also the functionality of the ultimate system, it might be easier to propose alternatives - not just alternative equipment, but an alternative system design in general.

edit:

Take a look at the Omega CNi8C22-C24 and CNiS8C24-C24 devices → these are DIN PID temperature and voltage measuring devices that will receive inputs from your thermocouples and strain gauges, process the inputs to the corresponding measurements and communicate with LabView (or whatever) through RS-232 .

Answer 3

This is not necessarily a programmatic answer, but if you want a low-cost data acquisition, you can look at labjack . This is mainly a microcontroller and a USB interface, wrapped in a nice box (for example, arduino (Atmel AVR + USB-Serial converter), but a closed source) with many drivers and functions for different languages, including labview.

Reading a thermocouple can be tough because microvolts are significant, so you need either high-resolution A / D or an input amplifier. I think NI may sell a specialized digitizer for thermocouple readings, but again you will pay.

As for the software answer, labview will work with almost any equipment that you choose - for example, I built my own arduino temperature controller (with AD7780 ), wrote a small interface using serial commands, and then talked to it using LabVIEW. But if you are ready to pay a premium for guaranteed work from a turnkey solution, you will not go wrong with labview and part of NI.

Answer 4

LabWindows CVI is an NI C IDE that integrates well with its tool libraries and drivers. If you want to write C code, perhaps you could get a basic version of LabWindows CVI, rather than buying a more advanced version of LabView, which has the necessary functions. LabWindows CVI and LabView are priced the same for the base versions, so this may not be a big advantage.

Answer 5

Given the range of measurement types that you plan to take, and the fact that you want your colleagues to use this, I would suggest LabVIEW is a good choice - it will support everything you want to do and make it a straightforwardly decent graphic interface. Assuming you are on Windows, the basic package should be adequate, and if you want to create standalone applications, either for deployment on other PCs, or in order to make a certain setup as simple as possible for your colleagues, you can buy the application builder separately later .

As far as DAQ hardware is concerned, you can save money - for example, Measurement calculations have an inexpensive 8-channel USB thermocouple input device - but it may cost you setup time or be less reliable to re-configure your equipment for different tests.

Answer 6

I have some experience with LabView materials, and if you can afford it, this is awesome (and useful for many different applications).

However, if your applications are simple, you can really hack something with one or two arduins here, this is OSS, and it has some pretty good cheap boards.

LabView really comes to life with real-time or RAD applications (because the GUI developer is very simple), so if all you do is a couple of thermal packages, I would find something cheaper.

Answer 7

A few thousand dollars is not a lot of money for monitoring and process control systems. If you analyze the costs and results, you will very quickly recover your development costs if the scope of the system is correct and if it performs the task that it is intended to be performed.

Another instrument to consider is the National Instruments measurement studio with VB.NET. That way you can still use NI hardware if you want, and you can quickly create a good gui.

As an alternative, as others have said, it's quite possible to get industrial serial tools and talk to them with LabVIEW, VB.NET, C # or whatever you like.

If you go down the route of serial instruments, another useful device might be a serial terminal ( example ). They allow you to connect arbitrary device numbers to your network. Computers can then use them as if they were physical COM ports.

Answer 8

You looked at MATLAB. They have a Data Collection toolbar. compactDAQ - supported hardware.

Answer 9

LabVIEW is a great visual programming environment. In terms, if we want to drag, drop, and visualize our system. NI equipment also comes with the NIDAQmx library, which is accessed through our code. It would probably be advisable for you to import the libraries into another programming language and write code for all the actions that you are otherwise going to perform using LabVIEW. Although other overheads, such as code optimization, will be the responsibility of the user, you can customize the normal flow of methods by making your own improvements to the appropriate connections in the DAQ process.