Research & Design About Virtual Instruments Based On LabVIEW

With the development of modern science and technology and development of modern industrial production, higher requests are put forward to electrical testing and instrumental technology. The testing task and object becomes more and more complicated, and with the increasing testing quantity and the requests for higher testing speed and accuracy, the traditional testing style operated by human is no longer right for modern testing tasks. The virtual instrument technology as a perfect combination of the instrumental technology and computer technology makes a wonderful scheme for testing engineers. With the virtual instrument technology, engineers only have to send the signals to be tested into computers via I/O interface devices, and then with special VI developing tools and the abilities of data analyzing, data processing and data storing of computers, they can easily design a VI system which meets special testing requests. This paper puts emphases on a VI system designed for automotive ignition coil testing.Automotive ignition coil is a very import part for the motor of automobiles. It gives great impact to the performance of auto motors. So it is of great importance to test ignition coil in order to assure the overall performance of an automobile. There're many parameters to be tested before the performance of ignition coil is made clear. The test of an ignition coil is very complicated and requests high accuracy. So if all the work is carried out by hand, it will be very time consuming and meanwhile the test results will be affected by the states of test operators. These two sides are not endured to a professional ignition coil producer. The VI auto test system studied by this paper resolved the problems perfectly.The VI auto test system studied by this paper is based on a PC and three data acquisition cards and it is developed with the graphical virtual instruments programming tool LabVIEW7.0, which is produced by NI. With this developing environment, all the hardware is integrated into a well functioning auto test system. The users just have to make a click with the mouse to send a testing command and the test results will be displayed on the screen very soon. As for the part of data acquisition, an intellectual algorithm is designed to promote the accuracy of the entire VI auto test system by adjusting the sampling frequency and vol/div of the oscillating card, which enables the system with self-adaptation.With a traditional test system, users can only control the system and get the testresults copy on local machines. But the system discussed in this paper permits anyremote access through the network via an internal technology of NI--RemotePanels. With Remote Panels, users are able to control the system at any place and get the test result copy easily. The application of Remote Panels makes the auto test system a real remote virtual instrument.