Hi. My name is Mike Hawes. And I'm an application engineer with Agilent Technologies.
Today,I want to tell you about BenchLink Data Logger Pro. This is an easy to use software
program that comes along with the 34972 Data Acquisition unit.
And today, I'm going to show you a couple of advanced features, primarily focused on
multiple scans and being able to sequence between those scans. So let’s take a look
at the computer here.
So now let me describe the scenario we’re going to be running with our demonstration
today. Basically, we’re going to be looking at the temperature of a heater thermistor 1.
And we want to keep it within a high and a low limit.
So we’ll heat up that temperature by turning on the heater. And when it hits the top limit
of 27 C, we’re going to turn off the heater automatically. What I also have available
here are a couple of manual switches, where I can turn on a fan manually, or I can turn
on the heater manually.
The way that we’re going to turn off our heater when it hits the top limit is with
Alarm 2. So you’ll see an LED go off, and that will override the manual switch.
Let’s move to BenchLink Data Logger.
Here is the Configure Scan List screen. And as I mentioned, we have two scan lists in
our scenario today. One is the run up, where we’re heating up the heater, and we’ll
see the temperature rise. And the second is run down. Let’s take a look at the run up scan.
We’re only looking at one of the multiple channels that we have available. And we’ve
selected T1. That’s the thermistor associated with the heater. We can set up the function
and other different parameters for the specific channel. And in this case, we have a limit set.
As we’ve mentioned, if the temperature goes above 27 C – that’s our high limit – then
we’re going to issue an alarm, a hardware Alarm 2. And that will basically
turn off the heater.
Let’s take a brief look at the other scan, which is the run down. Again, we’re really
only going to be looking at thermistor 1, which is measuring the temperature of the
heater. But we do have a limit set there, where if it goes below 26.5 C, then we will
jump back to the other scan list and start heating the heater up again.
The Configure Events tab shows this sequencing. And I'm going to show you a nice feature,
which is the state diagram. The state diagram here shows both of the two scans. Remember,
we have one as run up heating, and the other one as run down cooling.
So when we’re running up, if we hit that 27 C limit, then it will sequence down to
the other scan – run down cool. And when we hit the limit of less than 26.5 C, which
will run back up to the run up heat. So we have an infinite loop going here.
When we hit the Stop button, then we will eject either out of the run up heat or run
down cool sequence and stop the experiment. Here are the actual events that we’re using.
Again, we have the run up heat, where we’re checking above the 27 C. And if we
hit that, we do Alarm 2.
And then our next step would be to go to the run down cool sequence, and that’s here.
And here, you can see that we’re looking at the limit – 26.5 C. And that’s the
lower limit. And then we’ll go back up to the run up heat. So that’s where
we’re getting the infinite loop.
So let’s go ahead and run the scenario. I’ll start the scan.
You can see we’re starting to measure T1. And I’ll turn the heater on manually, and it’s going to
start to rise. The line there shows 25 C, so when we get up to 27 C here pretty quickly, you’re
going to see it set the Alarm 2. You’ll see the little light go on. There it goes.
And we’re going to jump to our other scan, where we’re going to turn off the heater.
And you can see it’s starting to roll over. I'm going to simulate maybe a door or window
being opened by turning on the fan. So here comes the breeze.
And you can see that it’s going to decline faster – the temperature. So it’s going
to be declining. We’re down to about 27 C now. And once we get down to 26.5 C, you’ll
see another red dot. And this says we’ve hit our other event, and we’ll be
moving back to our run up scan.
So we’re just about there. There, we hit it. You can see the red light going on.
And now we jump back up to the run up. And the heater’s back on, and it’s cycling back up.
We’ll be now jumping to run down again.
So that gives you an idea on how it will run. And that concludes the demo that we have for you.
This has shown you BenchLink Data Logger Pro and a couple of the advanced features
that are available – multiple scan lists. It shows you how the events can sequence or
give you some basic sequencing between those scan lists. And it also showed you a nice
documentation feature that shows you the flow diagram between those scans.
So thank you. And I hope you enjoyed the video.