Lab windows driver for Watlow F4 temperature chamber

[vegorama]

Hello

I'm trying to use a temperature chamber in LabWindows. They provide a driver for LabView but not LabWindows.

Any one know of a port to LabWindows?

Cheers,

Ric

[RobertoBozzolo]

I seem to remember to have used a Watlow controller in the past but I never used a specific driver to communicate with it.

Since this controller follows Modbus specifications, I simply developed some little functions to properly format messages to / from the controller, connected via RS232.

Modbus communications has been discussed sometimes in the forums: here a solution from Jattie van der Linde, while here I linked some documentation on Modbus protocol, here some on CRC calculation and here a code fragment I used to communicate with a device.

I didn't find Modbus protocol difficult to implement, at least for basic tasks like querying some register or writing some values: I suppose this can be your case with a temperature controller which does not need a high rate of communications as temperature normally does not have very high dynamic.

[menchar]

I wrote a driver in for CVI for a Watlow controller a few years ago, there's not much to it, the Watlows are relatively simple devices.

It's not a "driver" in the CVI sense, but it does provide C functions to communicate with the controller.  I don't think I did a function panel for it.

I can post it here if you want to see it.

Menchar

[Dan12345z]

Can you post it?  I would like to see it.  Thanks

[Adam G]

Hello,

I saw that we do not have a driver for CVI to use with the Watlow device. You should still be able to communicate with the device use VISA commands.

Best Regards,

Adam G 

[menchar]

I spoke too soon -

I cannot find the Watlow driver I spoke of, which is a bit of a mystery - I found the driver we used prior to the Watlow (Micristar) and after (Sigma) but not the Watlow driver.

As I reacall it was very straightforward using CVI serial library.  The hardest part was figuring out the rather cryptic command set.  There are a lot of parameters that can be programmed, we depended on a one time local setup for most of these and by and large only changed the temperature setpoint remotely.

Sorry and good luck.

[Tim_R]

The documentation isn't as straight forward as we've learned to appreciate from company's like NI.  However, there is adequate documentation and examples on the Watlow website.  Regardless, here is the Watlow DLL and some simple code to run in single point mode.  Hope this helps, have fun.

[Tim_R]

Oops.  Forgot to include this file.

[ngay528]

If you are still interested, I attached is my own code I wrote for the WatlowF4 a year ago.  I found the labview translation files were pretty poor and some of the provided examples got me started.  Note that some of the non-popular functions/commands were not setup or are very basic.

Note, since RS232 seemed fishy at times for me, I wrote some redundancy into the program.

Nick

[pink1]

Hi,

I am trying to control the F4 temperature controller using cmd line.

I am trying to use the code you posted. Could you please send me a sample profile you may have run to say set a particular temperature using the RS232 IF.

Also could you post the cvidef.h file as its missing from the attachment.

Thanks