Flush log buffer to disk while running?

[encore]

I'm running the free version of Signal Express that came with NIDAQmx 8.7.1. I've got a simple logging application running where I sample 8 analog channels from two USB6008 devices once per minute. I'm also logging to a TDMS file (two files, one per USB6008). The live data shows properly on the chart display, and after a few days I have data in the logfiles. Then I can copy that to a USB drive, and import it to Excel on another computer.

My question is, can I somehow force SE to flush its buffers to disk, so I can copy the data elsewhere and process it while the logger task is still running? After 6 hours of logging, the TDMS files are only 400ish bytes long, just the header/index information. If I wait a few more days, it will have written some data to the file, but I'd like to get everything that's in memory now, over to disk.

My goal is to have 1-2 weeks of data in a single file, but be able to analyze the first few days' data offline while the logger is still running.

This computer doesn't have Excel on it, so I can't drag things over that way.

Tom

[lady_engineer]

Hi Tom,

I am not sure that what you want is possible in signal express.  I am able to log data into a tab delimited text file file while acquiring data.  There is even a setting to append the data to the file so that you can log the data to just one file.  However, I was not able to find a way to log data to one single TDMS file as data is being collected. 

[encore]

That's not quite the question... I'm a total newcomer to SignalExpress, but was able to get a logging app going. I didn't mind that the two USB6008 devices had to go to two datafiles, I can recombine them in Excel later. But because my log rate is so slow (1 per minute), it takes a while to collect a significant number of bytes. Until it's reached some capacity, it logs to memory, and the logfiles in the newly-created folder are only about 1k large. After a few days, it dumps memory to disk, so the disk files go up in size in one shot, then stay that size until the next dump. This is while the SignalExpress logging tasks are running.

When I stop the process, it flushes everything to disk, and I can then copy the TDMS files elsewhere. But until it's flushed out the data, there's nothing on disk to copy over.  What I was hoping for was a button marked "flush to disk" or something like that, which would write all logged data to disk, while continuing to run. I'm coming from a paperless-chart-recorder background, where you need to flush data to diskette before ejecting the diskette, but the recorder keeps logging while the disk is out.

Tom