Tickness Report

[CrAyZ]

LabVIEW Professional Development System v8.2
Windows XP Service Pack 2

I have a VI that reads in an array of thickness values from a remote server via OPC. I manipulate the array to get a percent deviation from average thickness. At this point, I want to graph the thickness array and print out a report.

Although there is significant work to be done, I have gotten LabVIEW to put the front panel waveform control and an ID number into an HTML report. However, the waveform graphs in LabVIEW have a completely black background and are impractical for printing purposes.

My main question is, having no additional toolkits or anything, can I open the final, manipulated array in Excel and perhaps use LabVIEW to initiate an Excel VBA macro that will create the plot and print it?

If not, I will have to use the Picture Plot VI's, which I've had very little success with in the past.

Any suggestions?

Attached are my VI and one of the HTML reports that I've created.

[CrAyZ]

Here is pretty much exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for...

I'll also have to look at the last 15 values or so on each end of the array and put the maximum peaks on my report, but that shouldn't be very difficult.

[gwd]

You can change pretty much any of the characteristics of a chart or graph using either the paintbrush tool or property nodes. That means background, grids, font size, etc. etc.

And I just can't resist- Excel has lousy defaults for nearly every aspect of the charts it makes. If it were me I would work within Labview to make the chart look the way the chart SHOULD look, not the way Microsoft thinks it should look.

[minnellac]

gwd, I generally agree with you about Excel graphs, but one thing it's got going for it is category labels on the x axis (like in the example). Actually, these are actually displayed at an angle. I love LabVIEW, but the graph controls are getting a bit long in the tooth. I recently spent a considerable amount of time with ZedGraph to make good looking bar graphs that I could display within LabVIEW apps. It's open source, and makes very pretty graphs that are highly customizable.

http://zedgraph.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Here's an example:

Message Edited by C. Minnella on 06-14-2007 09:11 PM

[mikeporter]

Create a subVI that has a graph with all the properties set like you want for your printout. On the subVI's block diagram, update the graph data with data from the main VI. Next, pass a reference to the graph to the report generation VI: Append Control Image to Report.vi.

Mike...

[mikeporter]

So do you have VIs for working with ZedGraph that you would be willing to share?

Mike...

[minnellac]

Mike, I just needed a little nudge to organize things a bit. Here's a vi library with some vi's I made to help work with the ZedGraph control as well as an example of using most of them to make a simple bar graph. ZedGraph does a lot more than bar graphs, but that's what my application was for, so I didn't play too much with the other features. When I started with ZedGraph, I basically worked through the tutorials on the wiki. I highly recommend that to get a good idea what ZedGraph can do. The only downside of this whole thing is .NET 2.0 is required (and obviously this is Windows only).

The zip also contains version 5.04 of the ZedGraph dll and the documentation that goes along with it.

Message Edited by C. Minnella on 06-15-2007 11:15 PM

[minnellac]

Sorry CrAzY, I haven't really addressed your question directly. Did you get what you were looking for, or do you still have questions?

Chris

[CrAyZ]

I think I'm set for the time being. I wasn't aware of the paintbrush tool and some of the customization options for waveforms. I'll let you folks know if I run into any trouble.

I appreciate the help...

[CrAyZ]

gwd-

When I use the paintbrush tool, it makes the background of my waveform the color I want it, but there's this 3-D gradient effect around the edges of my graph that are still gray. Is there a way to make those change as well? Also, when I display an indicatior on my front panel, it has the 3-D border that won't let me change colors.