Variety! The spice of testing

[PReitano]

I have a variety of equipment for testing. For example I can use either a Agilent Power Supply or a Keithley Sourcementer. My question is, what is the best way to code in LabView to give the user a selection without making my code to big. I am not using the drivers for the instrument because they are to big and I only need certain functions. However not all instruments understand the same instructions. I am using LabView 6.02 to code my program. I have a variety of multimeters, power meters, spectrum analyzers and so on, that I have to give the user the option to select from.

[Dennis_Knutson]

One approach is to use IVI drivers. If you're not familiar with IVI, you might want to go here for more details, but basically IVI is based on the concept that certain classes of instruments, while having different command sets, have a common set of functions. For example, a DMM from Fluke or one from Agilent would be programmed differently but they both do essentially the same thing. The IVI driver puts those common functions into a high level application layer. With IVI drivers, your program doesn't change at all for different instruments being selected.

[Al_S]

Unless you just want to make a basic command line interface, you probably want to have a front panel for each instrument, not just one big panel trying to accomodate all instruments. On your main panel, one of the most flexible ways of giving the user a bunch of instruments to choose from is to put the list of instruments into a ring or enum control. Have a boolean button like an OK button to open the front panel of the selected instrument. The diagram will have a case structure wired to the ring or enum in a loop. SubVIs for each instrument, set to Show Front Panel When Called (VI Properties >> Window Appearance >> Customize), will be in the appropriate case. If you want to be able to have multiple instrument front panels open at a time, you may need to use a VI S
erver to launch the subVIs and return to the main VI while the subVI is still running.
In these days of disk drives at pennies a megabyte, I don't worry too much about my applications being "too big".

[PReitano]

I read about IVI drivers and they seem to be what I was looking for. However I am not to user how to code them. What steps do I take so I can assure myself I am coding my application right? I don't have the simulation.

[PReitano]

Is there an application or a simple procedure that I can follow with IVI drivers?

[Dennis_Knutson]

Look at the information here. One thing about IVI that you should be aware of is that there are only a limited number of IVI instrument classes (scope, dmm, function gen, power supply, switch) and if you have instruments that don't fit in the class, you'll have to try another approach. For that situation, what I've done is the plug-in approach. There's a shipping example called Plug In Example that might give you some ideas.