Peter, Jon and I are building a Programmable Electronic Load. In this series of blogs I'm building a LabVIEW library of reusable components
In this fourth article: Set the constant mode function to Current, Voltage, Power or Resistance |
LabVIEW has a set of blocks to build flows with serial communication devices. Those blocks work well with our instrument.
However, inspired by what many instruments do, I'm creating more abstract blocks.
Function Set Block
This blog is also easy. It configures the instrument to constant current, voltage, resistance or power mode..
For the Function block, the input parameters are
- VISA resource name eload
- Instrument Function
- error in (no error)
The output parameters are
- VISA resource name out
- error out
After running this block, the following functionality is performed:
- The Instrument is set to one of the following constant regulation modes
0: CURR
1: VOLT
2: POW
3:RES - If an error is detected, the VISA resource is closed and error info is passed to the caller.
Else the block passes the measured value to the calling flow via the Measurement parameter.
Setting the Function
Depending on the value you pass (in this example 0: current), it will set the instrument to the desired regulation mode.
The instrument doesn't support these functions yet. It'll always switch to constant current when you use a function it doesn't understand. If you like this to be different, check out the source of the firmware in github and improve it. |
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