Real-time measurement and control with NI DIAdem

25 years ago, NI acquired GfS Aachen and added its flagship software DIAdem to its portfolio, ensuring its worldwide distribution. During this time, DIAdem’s data management capabilities have been consistently developed further – just think of the TDM data model, the DataFinder and the DataPlugIns, which make any data format accessible. At the same time, DIAdem’s capabilities in the area of data acquisition and control have been just as consistently neglected. While NI continued to develop new easy-to-use measurement software (such as SignalExpress and FlexLogger), whose tasks DIAdem could have easily taken over, DIAdem largely lost its real-time capability and was more and more reduced to evaluation tasks.

However, our experience with our applications and the feedback from our customers confirm that the original concept (and unique selling point) of DIAdem of combining data acquisition and analysis in one software is right. We have therefore continually expanded DIAdem to maintain its measurement and control capabilities, e.g. by adding an interface to compactRIO in order to transfer time-critical tasks to it. And our communication library for the real-time Ethernet boards of the cifX family from Hilscher is also available for DIAdem.

But here, too, another conceptual idea of DIAdem, namely the focus on the PC platform, has proven to be the ideal basis for cost-effective and flexible solutions. Consequently, we combined DIAdem with another PC-based software – TwinCAT – to restore lost capabilities: our TwinCAT add-on for DIAdem can acquire data, control and regulate, generate signal curves from TDM files – all in real time – and save measurement data in DIAdem format.

CONTACT:
Holger Mueller
Email: mueller@mueller-krahmer.de
Mobile: +49 160 / 287 7294