sharing equipment

[lmtis]

Hi all,

I have two test stations that share a piece of equipment (a laser).  It is connected to a LAN/GPIB gateway for communications.  To ensure that only one station at a time accesses the laser, my application currently opens a file on a server.  If the other station wants the laser, but cannot open the file because the other station still has the file open, the operator gets a message that the other station is using the laser.  Is there a better way of doing this?  I am using LV7.1, and XP.

Thanks,

Jim

[GuenterMueller]

Hi Jim.
Your approach with the file is easy to understand and easy to maintain.

You might consider creating a server application for your laser, so any client application that wants to control the laser, must communicate with that laser server application. That laser server might run on one of the both computers or a dedicated one ...

I don't think that your scenario (two stations that deal with one shared resource) justifies the approach of creating a laser server.
Using a shared file as a lock for a shared resource is a good solution as long as performance doesn't matter too much and the number of clients is small.

Regards, Guenter