Microprocessor Interfacing Techniques Lab VIEW Tutorial Part 10 | PHY 406 - Microprocessor Interfacing Techniques PHY 406 - Microprocessor Interfacing Techniques LabVIEW Tutorial - Part X File Output and Input Introduction File I O tends to be complex - simply because there are a myriad of things that you might want to do and the software has to be able to let you do most of them. LabVIEW can read and write four type of files Spreadheet These files consist of ASCII normal text with tabs in suitable places for importing into a spreadsheet. The VIs which control this form write one array to the file at a time. Character These are similar to spreadsheet files in that they consist of ASCII text but the format is freer. Binary Consist of the data in computer format instead of ASCII. That means that the computer can read them but you can t They are more compact than character files and do not suffer from round-off errors. They be trasnlated into ASCII by other programs. Since the data do not have to be translated from binary to ASCII they are also faster to write. Binary files can be files of 16-bit integers or single-precision reals. Datalog These are similar to binary files except that the data can be more complex types eg clusters . They must be read in the same format as they are writeen which constrains them more or less to be read by a similar LabVIEW program to the one which wrote them. This tutorial is going to be concerned with spreadsheet files only. If you understand these - then you will be able to understand the LabVIEW elements of the others very quickly. Writing Arrays The unique thing about spreadsheet files is that they take either 1-D or 2-D tables of data. This is a simple VI to write a 1D array of 50 random numbers to a file. This is a representation of the output you get from this VI . In other words a long line of numbers. This is probably not quite what you were thinking of - I suspect that if you had thought about it at all then you would have expected a column of numbers one
