LabVIEW Data Socket Lockup with Eurotherm OPC Server

[davidpcl]

Hi,

I'm having an issue using LabVIEW datasockets with a Eurotherm iTools OPC Server.

I've setup a VI to read a couple of values from the iTools OPC Server using data socket i.e. open a socket, then within a loop read a value every second.

Unfortunately I've found that after a period of time (ranges from minutes to hours) LabVIEW freezes, and become entirely unresponsive - the only thing you can do is kill it from the processes in the task manager.

I was originally using LabVIEW 2011 to do this, but have also tried in LabVIEW 2015 with the same result.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Dave

[Tom-S]

Hi David,

It doesn't sound like you are doing anything incorrectly, however could you provide any screenshots of your code so that I can see exactly what you are doing?

I would check that you are not polling the OPC server to often, and check that you have sufficient timeouts on your data sockets to ensure that if your connection fails, LabVIEW isn't just sat there waiting infinitly for the connection to come back.

Thanks,

Tom

[d_n · Accepted solution]

Hi David,

What you refer as “LabVIEW freezes” might be due to OPC termination of communications.

Please be aware the free Eurotherm iTools OPC Server has a 30 minutes continuous connection time out for third party clients. After 30 minutes the OPC Server will shut down all comminutions to the clients. In your Labview code you need to handle the shut down of the OPC Server and close the datasockets.

You can purchase the Open version of Eurotherm OPC server that does not have the connection timeout limit.

I hope this helps

Regards

Dimitris

[davidpcl]

Hi Dimitris,

Yes we have discovered this purely by accident as iTools itself doesn't give any indication that it's closed down its comms - have been meaning to update this post to let other people know as the way everything crashes it looks like its the LabVIEW end that has the issue.

Also need to link to another post on here where someone has had the same problem.

Anyway, thanks for the response.

Dave