Hello, I need a bit of help and maybe a bit of a sanity check at this point. I'm VERY new to LabVIEW and am feeling a tad lost.
At work we are attempting to replace our horribly unreliable flat-bed paper chart recorders with a LabView setup. When I say we, I mean I alone was tasked with coming up a replacement which will be used by my labmates. These are used for detecting and recording fractions as they come off a column.
The acquisition hardware is:
1) National Instruments cDAQ-9171
2) National Instruments 9205
The devices we are interfacing with are:
1) Bio-Rad Econo EM1 UV monitor
2) Gilson FC203B Fraction Collector
The UV detector outputs a signal from 0-1V (though typical range of a fraction is 0-150mV). This signal was VERY noisy with around 40mV of high frequency noise on top of the real signal. A simple pi-filter between the DAQ and the UV detector killed almost all of this noise (other than a periodic oscilation with a frequency of less than 1 Hz.
The fraction collector has two pins on the back which short for 100ms each time it moves to a new tube. So I wrote a simple arduino program which alternates between logic LOW and HIGH each time a new tube is detected.
So in summary we have two inputs which must be overlayed. Initially Intially, I used the DAC assistant to input to a waveform graph and acheived this output:
This is OK but I want to be able to annotate tube numbers (attach them to data points on the red trace and have them stay attached to that data point). Also I want to autoscale the sizes because as you can see in the following image, its much easier to read with the graphs scaled to be similar heights.
As you can see, this chart was collected over almost 3h time (some charts will be up to 24h long).
I read that inorder to have two Y-axis as well as annotation I can't use the waveform chart. That instead I must use one of the XY graphs. This is where things start getting murky for me. I read at one place that I need to jetison the DAQAssistant so I began learning about manually creating the DAC channels using the DAQmx stuff. I was able to get two separate channels but now am feeling a bit lost. I am having a hard time figuring out how to break out the time axis for the XY chart, additionally, I'm a bit lost on how to combine the channels into one graph.
Sorry for such a noob question and I have a feeling I'll get a few STFU noob RTFM comments which maybe are fully warranted. I'm just drowning a bit in information overload and was hoping for a bit of a sanity check and any pointers you may have to push this forward. I am trying to learn this myself as I have several other stretch goals (HDD logging, logging resume, automated tube labeling, etc.) which I will eventually be tackling so taking shortcuts doesn't help me in the long run.
Thanks anyone who helps!