[click images to enlarge]

CUSTOM SERIAL HANDSHAKING WITH NIR ANALYZER CONTROL

CHALLENGE

To develop an application designed to serve as a client capable of listening for and processing custom commands over a serial network. Custom written software would control and collect results from an industry-leading NIR analyzer based on specific commands received over the serial network.

SOLUTION

The NIR Analyzer provided a specialized communication protocol, allowing a series of custom-written LabVIEW wrapper VI's to take control remotely. This allowed the controlling application to invoke scans, retrieve results and perform analyses.

A custom set of serial commands and queries (complete with parameters, return values and anticipated error conditions) were to be interpreted by the client via a parallel monitoring process. Once commands were received, parallel processes were executed specific to control of the analyzer (i.e. performing a scan and returning the results).