Overview: Minor modifications of VI for feasibility during real time use

 

1. The VI has a parameter called "comment". This helps us to understand what is the nature of our file. So, here you can input an extra parameter like rotation or your motive of measurement. Moving on, since we won't be rotating LC for birefringence measurements, we didn't add rotator control to our VI. Adding components decreased speed. So we made an extra component "comment" to save an extra parameter appended to our file.

 

2. Yesterday, when we were doing calibration measurements we had to switch off the controller(temp, voltage both) to save data for every unique rotation angle of LC (because only after switching off you can change the extra parameter in comments or create a new file). Switching off the VI every time and starting it back is extremely time-consuming as we need to wait several minutes before the temperature stabilized. To combat all these issues and easy long-term measurements for different parameters without switching off the VI, I removed the temperature controller's stop condition. Now, it's independent of the switch of the voltage controller and will turn off only when we exit the VI. This will make temperature control stable for the entire measurement.

 

3. Now we can save several sorts of data in the same file or even make new files without switching off the temperature control or camera. Also, you can change the "comment" during an ongoing measurement and it would save the new parameter as soon as you changed it. 

 

4. I removed voltage and temperature graphs, as the more visuals we have on the front panel the more tradeoff occurs with speed. Therefore, all the graph is now independent in a timed loop outside the main loop. This helped relax the speed. In programming, it's better to have two loops doing simple things rather than one loop doing too complicated and a lot of stuff. For extremely fast measurements, all these parameters do affect the speed. 

 

5. Previously, when we started saving 6 parameters VI slowed down a bit by 20Hz. As a matter of fact, all the new changes have been made in a way that our speed is not compensated and it still saves data at 80Hz.