Motivation
When designing a test bench for evaluating the performance of Tesla turbines, we were faced with an issue not too rare: almost every sensor/transducer/controller was provided with their own software, some were impressive, others looked straight out of a Windows XP demo. Also, while some suppliers included the control software with their hardware price, others wanted to charge extra.
Even if all the sensing and controlling hardware came with adequate software, there was still another issue: how to control the whole test bench while coordinating several software solutions from different companies.
Requirements
This led to the need to develop our own solution, a control software which is:
- Capable of interfacing with all of our hardware (capturing sensor data and sending control signals from/to hardware);
- Allows for data capture and logging;
- Intuitive and easy to use;
- Safe;
- Beautifully designed with a modern UI (since "beautiful design" is quite subjective, the passing test was my own definition of it);
Solution
A control software was developed in LabView, consisting of an highly modular asynchronous solution. The hardware interface is abstracted via a Hardware-abstraction-layer, which allowed quick development and modularity in case the hardware changes in the future.
The UI interaction is handled asynchronously from the data capture, in a separate thread, in order to avoid laggy interfaces.
The software also logs all the user's interaction in a text file for future auditing.
Here is a preview of the monitoring page of our beta version:
This project is still under development. More details will be added once it is finished.