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Hi. My name is Mike Hawes. I'm an application engineer with Agilent Technologies. And today,
I want to talk to you about BenchLink Data Logger Pro. This is a software product that
we sell with our 34972. And it helps you get up and running real quickly.
So let’s go ahead and turn to the computer. This table shows you the difference between
Data Logger Pro and the basic BenchLink Data Logger that’s free with your 34972.
I want to focus on three features of BenchLink Data Logger Pro.
The first one of those is multiple scan lists. Secondly, I want to show you the limit checking
and the ability to do some simple sequencing between scan lists. And then the main emphasis
will be on the customizable scripts.
Let’s take a look at a demonstration setup. First, I want to describe the scenario of
simple temperature monitoring. We’re going to use one thermistor T5 to monitor the ambient
temperature. And then if it goes above a threshold of 26.5 C, we’ll be turning on
the fan to cool things down.
Then we’ll be monitoring temperature and the tachometer in the fan, to make sure that
the fan is running appropriate speed. If it’s too fast or too slow, we have another limit
situation, where we’re going to turn on Alarm 1, which will send out a script and
immediately shut down the fan.
So now let’s take a look at BenchLink Data Logger Pro. Here, we have the Configure Scan
Lists tab. And I have two scan lists. One is monitoring the ambient temperature. We’re
doing that, again, with a thermistor T5. Our limit situation is – we will send out an
Alarm 1 when we go above 26.5 C.
The second scan list shows, yes, we’re also monitoring the temperature here. But we’re
monitoring the tachometer, and this is measuring the fan speed. And our limit range here is
between 100 and 155 Hertz. So if it goes out of that range, then we’re going to be
turning off the fan.
The events are actually how this is set up. The first event is for the “Monitor Ambient
Temperature” script. Again, you can see we have the limit at 26.5 C. We’ll send
out Alarm 1. And then this event will stop, and we’ll move to the next scan list, which
is the “Turn on FAN” scan list. That’s below here. Then you can see the limit.
And down here, we’re going to be monitoring the tachometer, and the limit will be between
155 and 100 hertz. If the fan goes outside of that limit, we have a script that we’re
going to run, which is called the “STOP FAN” script. Let me show you that script.
Here, you can see we’re sending it to our 34970 Instrument 1. And this is the simple
script that goes out to that fan. It’s a command that will turn off all the alarms.
This feature actually allows you to communicate with any instrument that’s connected to
your PC, and send out SCPI commands.
Finally, after running the script, we can do notifications. In our example, we’re
going to do a simple beep. But you could also do a notification – for example, sending
out emails to notify people they need to come and do some maintenance on the fan.
So let’s go ahead and run the scenario.
You can see I'm warming up the T5, so you
can see it climbing. And once it gets to 26.5 C, you’re going to see another script run.
There it is. We see the red light coming on. And we’ve jumped to now scanning between
the tachometer reading and the ambient temperature.
So our tachometer reading is doing fine. That line is about 145 hertz, so we’re within
the band. What I'm going to do now, and you’re going to hear as I put my finger in the fan
– it’s going to slow down the fan, and we’ll have that script run, which will
turn off the fan.
Sure enough. You saw that we were running the script, and we’ve stopped the fan.
And that concludes the demo today. We’ve basically shown BenchLink Data Logger Pro running some
of the advanced features – in particular, multiple scans, sequencing, and scripting,
being able to write SCPI commands to other instruments.
Thanks for watching.