Touch panel diagnostic tool

[LW42]

Good afternoon,

I am rookie in Touch Panel applications and I need some help here. I made a scan engine project which contains a cRIO(9014) and a touch panel (TPC-2106T). In addition I made three different vis in order to control a unit either from my PC or from the TP. The one vi runs on my PC (from there I can give commands like open a pump etc). This vi works fine, cooperating with the vi running on the cRIO can successfully control the unit (the vi running on the cRIO waits commands either from the touch panel or from my PC). Finally the third vi was supposed to be deployed on the Touch Panel in order to control the unit from there when the PC vi is stopped. The attempt of controlling the unit from the touch panel was unsuccessful thus I need to see that’s the problem. However, the practice I used is to deploy an exe on the touch panel but by this way I can’t see what’s wrong. Could you please advise if there is somehow a diagnostic tool for touch panel applications? And another question: it seems the vi running on the touch panel reads and writes extremely slow, do you think that this has to do with scan engine settings which are: Scan Period=1s and Network Publishing Period=500ms?

Thank you in advance

[Hesloppy]

There is not a separate diagnostics for the touchpanel.  What do you mean when you say it is unsuccessful from the touchpanel?

How are you communicating your data to the touchpanel?  If you are using the I/O variables then it is related to your scan engine settings.  Is the delay you are seeing bigger than the scan engine settings?

Also, with the Network Publishing Period half of the Scan Period you will be getting each data point 2 times because it is publishing it twice for every scan it takes.

Best Regards,

[LW42]

Good Morning Hesloppy,

Thank you for your response.

Data communication is accomplished by shared variables. The delay I am seeing is really big, that means that I turn a Boolean on and the associated DO channel is activated after 20-30 seconds even more. In addition the code is not executed by the expected way (the way is executed when I use the vi running on my PC). I am sending a simple vi to explain whta I mean when I say that a code can be executed differently in a PC than in a Touch panel. Please have a look at it. If this is running on the PC everything seems fine. If this is deployed on the Touch Panel the ring control is flickering. My real vi is full of “case structures”, “select” functions, “property nodes” which are not executed correctly. Thus, it seems that I have two main problems: the “slow” execution and the wrong execution. However, I am not sure if the “slow” is related to the “wrong or not properly” execution or if the code architecture should change in order to get the desired result.

Best Regards   

[LW42]

Sorry,

I forgot to attach the vi 

[RavensFan]

You have a while loop that is running as fast as the processor will allow it since you don't have any wait statement inside of it.  Even a Wait of 0 milliseconds will yield some time for the processor to do some other tasks.  Perhaps you are starving the background communication processes.  This was a problem with older PC's and you could see sluggish mouse and keyboard performance.  I haven't noticed it as much on modern PC's, perhaps because they have multiple cores.  But it is still a bad practice.  Since the touchpanel is going to be like a PC with older and/or limited resources, I think you will see an issue with a while loop like this that you won't see on a modern PC.

[Anna_K.]

Hello,

Did the above suggestion help?

[LW42]

Thank you for your interest on my question. Yes, it helped but there were also some small mistakes on my code that caused great problems. Now I think I am finding the way to the end, however I put a new post that you can find it and advise me in the following address:

http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=280&message.id=5999&jump=true#M5999

Finally I would like to mention a malfunction related to the boolean text of a Boolean button (Touch panel vi). More specifically I used a stop button and I selected “show Boolean text” and “multiple strings” (note that the text is located on the center of the button). The text doesn’t appear correctly on the start button (in both modes- off and on), is appeared partly. Since I had a similar problem previously, with an indicator, I imagine that it is the same case thus I would like to report a possible bug. If it’s not a bug please advise me to correct the problem.

Thank you in advance