Hello all,
I'm currently developing an undergraduate lab in which a laptop sends out a voltage via USB-6008 to a circuit board with an op-amp, the voltage is amplified, and then sent back into the laptop. The student is going to have to determine an "unknown" voltage which will run in the background (they can do this by a step test, graph V_in vs V_out and extrapolate to the x-axis).
Currently, I have two loops that are independent in my VI. The first loop is used to "Set the zero." When 0 voltage (V_in) is sent out of the laptop it returns a value around -1.40V (V_out) typically. Thus, I created the first loop to average this value. The second loop, averages the V_out values that come into the laptop as the V_in numeric control changes. Then I take the "set zero" value from the first loop and subtract it from the second loop average to get as close to 0V for V_out when V_in is 0V.
The problem I'm facing is, the event structure waits for the V_in numeric control value change, but after "SET ZERO" is pressed, if there is an unknown value, it will not be added to the average for V_out until V_in is changed by the user. So, I tried implementing a comparison algorithm in the "[0] Timeout Case." This algorithm works for step tests with positive values for V_in, but there are two problems.
1) Negative values cannot be used for V_in
2) If a user uses increasing positive values for V_in there is no trouble, but if they try to go back to 0, the value change event has been called and it is added to V_out as well as the timeout case.
Sorry for the extremely long post, but I've been banging my head over this and can't figure out how to properly implement this. I'm using LabVIEW 8.0.