What is wrong with this elapsed time counter?

[Paul@BSH]

I have been using this simple counter for a while. After unbundling the timestamp - there is always a '19' in the hours indicator. At first I was simply subtracting '19' and it worked fine. Then I ran a program for about 5 hours and the hour display changed to something odd (like a 16 or 17). Any ideas where the '19' comes from?

Thanks - Paul

[altenbach]

Wire a TRUE to the "To UTC" input of "seconds to Date/Time". If you don't, there will be an offset depending on your timezone setting. 🙂

(You probably also want to add a small delay inside your loop. Since you are only interested in seconds, a 1000ms delay would be plenty. Right now you are remeasuring the time every nanosecond or so, consuming all CPU resources for nothing useful. :o. ) 

Message Edited by altenbach on 02-08-2007 03:29 PM

[altenbach]

OK, typically you don't want to jump through all these hoops and drag along comlex timing fiunctions just to keep elapsed time.

Some simpler suggestions would be (see image):

(A) To place a 1000ms wait inside the loop, then place a simple indicator at the [i] terminal. Set the indicator to relative time format with HH:MM:SS. Voila!

(B) If you need s, m, h in seperate indicators, just do a few simple calculations

(C) If you don't trust the loop delay, maybe because you do complicated calculations that might take longer than a second in the same loop, Get the elapsed time from the tick count difference.

Message Edited by altenbach on 02-08-2007 04:05 PM

[Paul@BSH]

That was embarassingly simple to fix - duh! You suggest good alternatives - I use the counter as a part of a larger program where a user can measure, record and chart the temperatures of thermocouples. We can have anywhere from 1 to 100 thermocouples - if reading just 5 TC's the scan goes very quickly, but if you are reading 90 TC's it takes much longer to scan - That's why I like taking the difference of the actual clock time.

Thanks - Paul