LabVIEW utilities - sequences or recipes

Using Recipes on New or Existing LabVIEW Programs

Introduction

Researchers at the department of Chemical Technology "ChemE", of the faculty of Applied Sciences of the Delft University of Technology, often use LabVIEW to control their experimental setups. LabVIEW programs or vis, short for virtual instruments, can perform many pre-determined tasks.

The need for a higher degree of automation and more flexibility resulted in a program that can execute a script or recipe on new and existing programs. Recipes can add timing, repetition and conditional program flow to a LabVIEW program without changes to the LabVIEW block diagram or graphical code.

From the manual

recipe.vi is a top-level vi in recipe.llb.

recipe.vi is a separate utility, which, through recipes, can automatically perform actions on an existing vi.

Working with recipes has several advantages over working manually:

• the operator doesn't have to stay close to the PC
• the process variables can be changed with high speed
• typing errors during the process can be avoided
• repeated data entry can be automated

A recipe is a list of commands. Small recipes can be made or changed with the built-in editor. However, it is recommended to use Notepad or an equivalent editor. The recipes are simply stored as ASCII files, ending with '.rcp', and can be read by this utility.

Recipes will be executed line by line. One line may contain several, ';' separated commands. The manual describes all existing commands.

Recipes may contain empty lines. Two consecutive empty lines will be regarded as the end of the recipe.

You can read the manual as webpage or download it as Word document.

vi-server

This utility is largeley based on vi-server. With this technique it is possible to make LabVIEW programs that control other LabVIEW programs on the same computer or even on other computers.

Downloads

recipe.llb version 20071015 09:30
LabVIEW library file containing the specific set of vi's

get controls.llb
LabVIEW library file containing the set of vi's to get all names from and references to controls and indicators of a given vi

recipes.doc
Manual, English version

Note: All vi's have been made with LabVIEW 7.1 Full Development System.

Acknowledgement

This utility could only have been made because of it's users at DelftChemTech: Ali Akhavan, Daniël van Herk, Jurrian van der Dussen, Michael van de Weg and Renske Beetstra.

Special thanks to Ronald van Dijk for giving the first assignment to add recipe-executing functionality to the robotarm setup in the 'Proeffabriek' (pilotplant facilty at DelftChemTech) and to Jan van Erven for giving ideas and suggestions and for making remarks to further improve the usability of the recipe.vi utility.

Issues

known:

solved: