Davis Instruments Vangage Pro Weather Station and LabVIEW

Question

I am developing a VI for communication with the Davis Instruments
Vantage Pro Weather Station in LabVIEW.  I need to be able to take the
current weather conditions off of the weather station and display them
in a VI.  The Weather Station will be connected via RS232 to a Compact
Fieldpoint.  Currently I am planning on sending the request command
over the serial (through VISA?), which would return a signal containing
all of the the needed data (which could be parsed within LabVIEW). 
Does anyone know either how to do this or a better way to communicate
with the Weather Station?
Thank you,
Joshua

Answer 1

Joshua:
Nice find on the Davis site, I haven't been there in years....
Looks like you have a couple options.
1. They have documented the serial command set and data format. You can look in LabVIEW help and search examples for serial communication (like Basic SerialReadandWrite). Set up the COM port accordingly and send a simple command and read the response as a test. To create a driver, at least in LabVIEW 8.2, under Tools/Instrumentation/CreateInstrumentDriverProject- use a GeneralPurpose (Message Based) for a source driver. I never have used it, but it may get you quicly started on the path. You can also probably use Windows Hyperterminal first as a sanity check before trying LabVIEW.
2. They also have a nice dll library that appears to be well documented. Within LabVIEW, you can make calls to the dll and get data back. As long as it was written in C osr stdcall, you can use the CallLibraryFunctionNode function. There is a section in the LabView Help- Calling Code Written in Text Based Languages that describes how to do this.
Hope this helps
-AK2DM
Edit: I just saw you are using Compact Fieldpoint- Not sure what that is and how it may affect use of the options above.
Message Edited by AnalogKid2DigitalMan on 04-03-2007 03:05 PM
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