Help with Interfacing a Labview UI to Teststand

[anshuljain]

Hi all,
I'm a fairly recent Teststand developer. We have an application where, a Labview front panel (UI) has been created with a fairly complex LV code running under it. My aim is to modify the large steps into small modules (read sub-VI's) and call them through Teststand in a multi-threaded fashion. However, I want to retain the same UI and pass any change in values on the UI screen back to the Teststand back-end which will call the relevant modules. Can anyone suggest some ideas/literature on this? Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Anshul

[SarahM]

Hi Anshul,

It sounds like what you're trying to do is convert your LabVIEW front panel into a TestStand operator interface. I would start by reading about TestStand operator interfaces and how they work. This will help you understand how the architecture should work and give you a start for developing your application.

I would suggest reading Chapter 1 (TestStand Architecture) and Chapter 9 (Creating Customer Operator Interfaces) of the TestStand reference manual. You can find the reference manual by going to Help >> Search the TS Bookshelf... and clicking on the link to the TestStand Reference Manual (from within the sequence editor).

In addition you may want to look at the following example program that shows how to pass information between your code modules and the operator interface using uimessages.

How to work with UIMessage in TestStand 3.0

Operator interface programming changed significantly between TestStand 2.0.1 and TestStand 3.0 so be sure that any information you're looking at is for the correct version of TestStand.

I hope this helps!!

Regards,

Sarah Miracle
National Instruments

[anshuljain]

Sarah,
Thanks a lot for the link, I was able to create a simple Teststand UI using the API commands to pass the sequence files into the API and the TS engine takes over then. I am going to create seperate .seq files for each test case that we're going to run, and selecting the test case will activate the TS engine to execute the LV VI's. Now, if I wish to deploy this system, i'll have to build an executable in Labview. But how do I handle the references to VI's in each of the .seq files, which are loaded after the application runs? Or do I have to create the entire app in Teststand?
Thanks in advance,
Anshul

[SarahM]

Hey Anshul,

There is a tool in TestStand 3.0 and later called Deploy TestStand System (There's a different tool for earlier versions of TestStand). This tool helps you to deploy both your LabVIEW exe, sequence files, code modules (VIs called by your sequence file), the TestStand engine and other files. It basically packages up everything you'll need. You do not need to build the VIs that TestStand calls into executables (only your operator interface). TestStand can call VIs with only the runtime engine installed.

You can access to tool by going to Tools >> Deploy TestStand System (from within the sequence editor). There is also a chapter in the TestStand reference manual on deployment (Chapter 14 - Deploying TestStand Systems).

I hope this helps!!

Regards,

Sarah Miracle
National Instruments