Swinders

We looked at doing something similar to this a few years ago. What we needed was to monitor a temperature of a test fixture that could be used by a number of test rigs. This was achieved by adding a USB thermocouple device (NI USB-9211A and later an NI USB-TC01) and running a LabVIEW executable in the background that read the temperature and logged it to a database. We wanted this to start as soon as the PC was on regardless of if it had been logged in and didn't want the logging application be visible to the users so we ran it using a service. Initially we used a tool called FireDaemon although we had some issues between this and our antivirus software so I created a small service to call a LabVIEW executable every 10 minutes. This is still working today and meets all our requirements. I posted a summary of this on my blog although there is no much detail there (contact me if you want any further details). One important thing to remember is if you run as a service (or are calling a LabVIEW exe from a service) there can be no user input. Don't try and update a front panel and make sure all errors are handled so no dialogue boxes appear.