Help with filter wheel control.

[seth91282]

I have two of Thorlabs' FW102B filter wheels and I am hoping to control them with LabView. My first problem is implimenting the filter wheels as controls. I don't know where to find the control to put into the front panel. I'm going to try to program different time intervals for different filters. I don't believe that that part will be much of a problem but I'm new to LabView so I can't be positive. Idealy this could all be integrated together to work with Maxim DL in sync with our CCD.

I appreaciate any help. Thank you.

[Albert.Geven]

Hi

You have a lot of possibilities for implementing the control

I would use an array of colorboxes and using the index in the array as the number for the filter in the beam

and in the arrayelement I would show the color of the filter or an indication.

Another option is to use a picture ring and have the wavelength or a picture in  the ring.

I have somewhere an old library I used for a filterwheel from a different vendor, I'll try to find it.

[Justin_E]

Hey Seth,

I checked our Instrument Driver database (www.ni.com/idnet) and didn't see any drivers for the FW102B. We do supply various front panel controls that ship with LabVIEW, but if these are not adequate then what you can do is create your own custom control. Take a look at the LabVIEW help article titled Creating Custom Controls, Indicators, and Type Definitions (This help article is for LabVIEW version 8.6, so depending on what version of LabVIEW you have this information might change). Also, you might want to look at using XControls to create a customized control. Information on doing this can be found in this Developer Zone article : Creating New Front Panel Objects with LabVIEW XControls

In addition, you will likely need the NI-VISA driver to communicate with this device in LabVIEW, which can be found here : https://www.ni.com/en/support/downloads/drivers/download.ni-visa.html

If your device uses GPIB communication, then you will also need the NI-488.2 driver, found here : https://www.ni.com/en/support/downloads/drivers/download.ni-488-2.html

[Albert.Geven]

Hi Justin

please don't advise xcontrols to starting users. That is like giving a heavy gun to a child, it can hurt itself or others.

I made also some remarks on the xcontrol example that is not updated since version 8.0

below is my comment:

This (xcontrol)example is too limited to show what can be done with xcontrols. Also the theory behind xcontrols is not documented correctly. I agree that this is not simple but to use this correctly more explanation is needed