Troubleshooting hints - differences between development environment and release environment

Question

Hello,
I am using LabVIEW 8.6 for an application involving stepper motors.  We are using 2 Velmex stepper motor systems to run PIR targets for a manufacturing test.  The problem I am having is that the program runs fine in the states where it was developed but hangs approximately every 10th run when running in the manufacturing environment in China.  Since I am on the EAst coast there is the 12 hour time delay, and I am planning on doing a live support call to find out what is going on.  The person who installed the code made some modifications, but I am not aware of the differences.  He also may send his code here and see how it runs.
The assumption I am making (based on past experiences from here in the States) is that the stepper motor interface is hanging.  since I can't recreate the problem here I can't troubleshoot it.
With a past prooject I was working I did some code on one machine, and when I ran it on a different machine the order of execution for items in a sequence was different between the machines.  Has anyone run into this before?  Unfortunately for the task at hand the stepper motor has to run at the same time that analog data on multiple channels are being acquired.
Any suggestions?
Mike
Mike

Answer 1

Thanks for the reply.  I did think about putting in a producer-consumer.  It turns out that there was a problem with the computer it was being run on.  The computer was changed and the problem got better, although it did not go away.  The stepper motor was done through a com port talking to another hardware / software solution.  The tasks are truly independent and pass no data between them.  However, the other task being run involves collecting analog data and updating on a chart (and in one instance stimulating an analog output), and when the stepper motor starts the analog data collection is not updated on the chart.  I figure this could be because the charts are a memory hog.  No data is lost, and it is running, so I figure if it's not broke don't fix it.  It now occasionally locks up. I can run it here for 100 times with zero lock ups, and the last report I got was it ran 30 times in china before locking up.  I may have to start examining differences between their machine and my machine.
Now as to the configuration management.  It needs to be clarified a wee bit.  I'm doing the initial code development / updating, and then we hand off to china, which can make code tweaks as needed.  They also have 3 lines running this program, and one of the items I did was to load the differences between lines from configiration files (INI files), and that I got working well.  We have fixture variables, items that vary between lines, and configuration items, which are I/O lines and what not.  The digital I/O and analog I/O referenced MAX tasks, and that worked well.  There are also a com port call for the stepper motor, and in another program an RF power meter, which had to be referenced from an INI file.  I will reccomend that they do their code development on one machine and create executables to store on the production lines.  We have been bouncing code back and forth from the team members from the states that are currently in china doing the install.
Mike
Mike