LabVIEW is a visual programming workbench provided by National Instruments. It is used in a variety of applications for distributed testing, measurement, and control systems. When combined with powerful data acquisition systems like Crystal Instruments Spider systems, it can accept a wide range of inputs from a wide range of sensors to perform real time spectral processing. This combination also enables the deployment of large scale custom industrial and production systems.

The Spider platform of products is equipped with DSP core processors that perform data acquisition and processing. Once configured, the algorithms in the DSP core acquires data from the input channels at the configured sampling rate and performs the processing as configured by the user.

A wide range of capabilities are available within the Spider platform of products to interact with the peripheral system via the digital inputs and outputs. When combined with LabVIEW, the scope of interaction among the various components within a large production or industrial system is greatly simplified.

Recent developments from the engineers at Crystal Instruments allows the Spider platform of products to be used along with LabVIEW to configure the Spider’s input and analysis parameters, visualize time and frequency data in real time for all channels, and to continuously record and download raw time data for post processing at a later time.

Spider LabVIEW Utility includes several examples and virtual instruments (vi). Users can configure the Spider system with desired settings and receive or visualize data.

To acquire data from the Spider, the input channel and the analysis parameters must be configured.

Input channel configuration is provided through the LabVIEW example and allows users to configure the measurement quantity, sensitivity of the connected sensor, and input mode including IEPE and a desired high pass filter cut off frequency.

The configuration of the analysis parameters available through LabVIEW are the sampling rate, block size (or line number), window type, averaging mode, overlap ratio and the number of frames to be averaged.

Once the test is running, raw time data and processed time and frequency data can be visualized. The LabVIEW utility includes examples to visualize any signal or all signals.

In addition, users can set the Spider to record the entire raw time data from all channels to the Spider’s front-end memory for further post processing.

The ability to download data and export from the LabVIEW utility provides users with the flexibility to use LabVIEW for further post processing or to use the exported data for further demand based processing with Matlab or Crystal Instruments’ Post Analyzer software.

In instances where certain statistical information is needed, such as Peak, Min, Max or RMS, the data is also sent by the Spider system and can be visualized on LabVIEW.

Error messages including channel failures or input channel overloads are available through LabVIEW utility.

If raw time data or processed spectral data needs further processing to perform mathematical operations to derive relevant results, it can be performed on raw time, processed time, or frequency blocks.

In typical applications, peaks of frequency domain data or time domain data require comparison with a fixed limit and alarms based on conditions need triggering to control or manage peripheral equipment.

Depending on the status of sensors read by Crystal Instruments’ Spider system, users can control a wide range of industrial equipment with LabVIEW’s assistance.

The Spider line of products includes front-ends such as the Spider-80SG which acquires data from a wide range of sensors including strain gages and the Spider-80Ti which connects RTD and Thermocouples for temperature measurements. Using LabView, the Spider system can read, process, and successfully deploy a wide range of sensors in large industrial and production systems.