Writing from abroad?

[iyeager]

Is it possible to use LabVIEW to write data, over an internet connection, to another computer?

Our company has data acquisition suitcases that are placed at customers facilities all over. Currently we save the data to a flash drive and then the customer pulls the flash drive, replaces it, and mails us the full one. However, I'd like a live or semi-live (only five minutes old?) version of the data if possible. I don't need to see the front panel, but would really just like to be able to write the information to our company's computer somehow. The cases have laptops with internet connections, so something that writes over the internet would be nice, or even a program on our end that goes in and grabs the data every five minutes or so, although, I'd have to write some semaphores into the current program I believe as file access might get messy then.

Any ideas?

-Ian

[jgcode]

Is it possible to use LabVIEW to write data, over an internet connection, to another computer?

Yes you certainly can e.g. TCP\IP or whatever flavor you prefer.

If you are using NI technology you might want to look at ni-psp too.

[pylb]

What about trying network stream, with a front-panel-less vi on the receiving side? That way you also have a buffering of your data if the network connection drops.

[Ryan Podsim]

As far as "is it possible?" Yes, it is possible. Think your biggest hurdle will probably be an IT issue. First you will need a computer to act as a server that can be "seen" by the Internet, so security will be a concern. Additionally the suitcase system will need access to internet(which you said it had), but there might be security concerns on your customer side, especially if you are using their network and connection. Outside of access, visibility and security; the internet is no different to a program then any in-office network.

How much data are you talking about? A few bytes or a few megabytes every few minutes? If it's a few bytes then you might want to look at web services for the posting new data to the server. If it's more, then look at standard TCP/IP or NI-PSP for data transfer. Depending on the number of deployed systems you have, you might want to think about bandwidth requirements, how many simultaneous connections you want to handle, and how you will deploy the new system.

[jzoller]

You could also go totally out of the LV band and perform a differential upload of your results files to FTP or SFTP every so often. This keeps you from having to refactor your code, and may be a little more friendly to security.