Communicate between Labview Data Acquisition VI and Matlab antenna control GUI

[as469]

Ok, here's some background behind what I'm trying to do.  I'm operating a radio astronomy synthesis imaging array.  It uses a Matlab GUI to control the azimuth and elevation of the antennas in the array, continually updating them to track astronomical objects.  I'm using a Labview VI to acquire data because we were unable to get Matlab to synchronously sample on multiple DAQ boards.  I'm using NI PCI-6115 boards, by the way.  I need to be able to move back and forth between one source (a calibrator) and another source (the object of interest).  However, I only want to acquire data when the antennas are on source, so I need some way for the control software in Matlab to be able to tell the data acquisition software in Labview when the antennas have arrived so data can be acquired, and for the Labview software to tell Matlab when it's done acquiring so the antennas can be moved to the other source.

I was thinking of having two separate text files for control signals, one for matlab to write to and labview to read from, and the other vice versa.  If anyone has any ideas as to how this could work better, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you very much.
Alan Stemmons
alanstem469@yahoo.com

[Eli_S]

Hi as469,

Have you considered using ActiveX? LabVIEW has ActiveX VI's that allow you to do communication with other applications. You would have to check if the other software you are using supports this. If it does, this approach would be more involved to implement compared to writing/reading files but in the long run it would be a more robust application.