Thermistor String Manual

Thermistor String Manual and Specs ( Underwater Acoustics Research Group |Back to research page |Back to RWB home |Back to P&A home )

Instructions for using the thermistor string and LabView program
The program is under the directory \d4\Darmat\project\tib\yassar10 (for program yassar version 1.0). It consists of two LabView vi's:

yassar10.vi main routine
const.vi constants and parameters

On the PC's local hard disk these would be under c:\project\tib\yassar10 .
To start things up, first have the Hewlett-Packard 34401A multimeter connected to the GPIB card, GPIB address = 22. The National Data-Acquisition interface should be in place. The eight digital I/O lines should be wired to the appropriate place on the Global S-ecialties Proto-Board which has the multiplexing circuit. The multiplexed channel voltage goes from a BNC on the protoboard to the multimeter.
The wires to the thermistors should be connected to the DB-25 connector on the protoboard, and thence to the inputs of the multiplexer.
The National Instruments programs are in the directory C:\Program Files\National Instruments. Double-clicking on yassar10.vi opens LabView and loads the program, ready to run. First, however, open const.vi and set the parameters:

number of channels: 12
number of samples: 10 for testing, 3600 for serious data-taking. This is the number of complete samplings of all the channels which will be done. The number of actual voltage readings will be equal to the product of the number of channels and the number of samples.

Now the vi can be started and it will run.
When the run is over, the data will be in c:\project\naut\tib\test.dat. This file must be renamed. For instance, the first file taken on October 3, 2001 should be named thm11003.000, the next thm11003.001, etc. They should be stored in c:\data\thermist\0110\03 , or if the unix file system is available, in the analogous place on \d4\Darmat\ .
The software to read the file and graph the results is on /d4/Darmat/project/naut/0109/string/. The program to read in data is read1.pro, an IDL program. It must be edited to put in the correct data file.