lcd to wifi camera to text to labview

[Knibber]

Hello, 

I'm doing in project, which I have no clue how to start, and I was hoping that somebody could help to complete it. 

situation:

There is a device that receives wastewater parameters from devices. Some of the devices are sealed so there is no possibility to add some extra sensor outputs. The K37 device from the picture sends the information to the government. That information is coded in a Chinese protocol and there is no possibility to get the information. 

http://i44.tinypic.com/73la47.jpg

(From the right angle, the lcd is better readable.) 

Since I want to import the data in Labview, I was thinking it might be possible to instal a wifi camera in front of the LCD that takes a picture every 10 seconds.That camera would send the picture to a software that converts the picture to numbers, and then get the values in labview. 

Am I thinking the impossible? As you can see I have no experience with this and I was hooping that somebody here could give me the information I need about the camera and possible ways to import the parameters in Labview. 

Thank you very much, 

Jan

[Knibber]

Hello again, 

I've downloaded a evaluation version of LabVIEW Vision.

And I think it has to work like this:

1. Connect a USB webcam to the computer

2. Import the webcam in labview

3. Take a picture every 10 secondes

4. Analyse in OCR the values

5. import the values into a graph

6. Set limit thresholds

7. put webinterface on LAN

is this possible? Does somebody has an example for something like this?

thank you, 

Jan

[JosD]

Hi Jan,

I think this is the way to go. To acquire images with Labview you will need the Vision Acquisition software module. The OCR can be done in LV as well, there some OCR vi's on the machine vision pallette (NI Vision Development Module required). A simple way to configure your webcam in Labview is using the Vision Acquisition Express vi. This saves development time, but you might want to use low-level vi's to reduce memory usage and to make the process more visible in your code.

Does this help you?

Kind regards,

Jos Deurloo