hochikiuser

Sounds good.  Will the testing be laboratory testing for development and offline sampling, or are you also planning to do online testing of each unit on the assembly line?  For the former, Dell would be a good choice. For the later, unless the factory floor is exceptionally clean you might want to look into an industrial PC or even a PXI chassis if your pockets are deep enough.

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The development pc will be in more of a 'lab' environment - a dell has been ordered.

The spinoff esp vi's with hardware may be in many places - it will be a piece of test equipment in its own right, may be portable, could be taken on site to an installation for example, test house etc. PC's for this will depend on the application.

Tests will also be carried out on a production line and yes I agree with the PXI, in fact our subby will be using / supplying that system for a particular project.

Good luck on your system.  If you don't mind my (our) asking, what type of testing / development are you going to be using the system for?  Could you describe a bit and the environment? Might give us a further thought or two that might help.

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The system will be used for developing test equipment to test electronic fire detection products. Our systems use a communication protocol similar to RS232 or RS485 (2 wire comms over long distance) we call ours ESP. A Labview ESP VI driver is currently under development at our subcontractors (software & hardware). We will use this with some labview code to control and take measurements from our products. Addtional hardware / code will be added depending on the actual product. Initially we will let the subcontractor take the strain - as we become experienced we will carry out more work ourselves.

Our current testing is written in 'C' with various hardware / software - all different including code! - depending on design engineer / even country! Our goal in production has been to standardise our test equipment, this is hopefully a step in that direction.

Thanks guys, gives me an idea, probably Dell, would like dual screen but maybe an issue with space, will order system / software this week, then the real work (and posts) start

cheers.

A question for users with experience in using labview in developing applications for test systems. What