System Documentation - Visio Stencils for Test & Measurement?

[rayodyne]

Hello there,

Was looking for some Visio stencils to help our documentation process. I could only find this company offering anything near what we need, but look at the price!!!

Agilent Shapes

R&S Shapes

Any suggestions/experiences for a cheaper solution for T&M?

-Chroma

[rayodyne]

Hello there,

Was looking for some Visio stencils to help our documentation process. I could only find this company offering anything near what we need, but look at the price!!!

Agilent Shapes

R&S Shapes

Any suggestions/experiences for a cheaper solution for T&M?

-Chroma

From this post on the NI forum also:

NI forum - similar question for PXI

[pallen]

Might want to check out the Open Office package.

[Mike Ashe]

Hello there,

Was looking for some Visio stencils to help our documentation process. I could only find this company offering anything near what we need, but look at the price!!!

Any suggestions/experiences for a cheaper solution for T&M?

Good grief, at those prices maybe I should take a sabbatical from LabVIEW and make Visio stencils for a few months

[mross]

Hello there,

Was looking for some Visio stencils to help our documentation process. I could only find this company offering anything near what we need, but look at the price!!!

Agilent Shapes

R&S Shapes

Any suggestions/experiences for a cheaper solution for T&M?

-Chroma

You could use an open source diagramming software. I get by pretty well with Dia. If you want fancy pictures of equipment you can get an open source photo editor to operate on digital photos of the equipment, these are then placed in the diagram as images that are scalable by dragging.

You wouldn't have a nice pallette of these images but you could put together an image catalog in a separate diagram and then copy and paste from it when placing them in the network diagram.

Unfortunately, creating new shapes in Dia for use as pallete (stencil) options is not easy or well documented, but it is better than making pallettes for Visio. Dropping in images is simple, but you would have limited options for connecting grips, and so on.

For all its difficulties, I really like DIa and use a lot but not for what youare talking about. I make illustrations in specs to document mechanical designs and to make functional block diagrams and similar. I don't have to follow anyone else' guidelines as to appearance.

Just Google Dia and you find it.

I suppose you could make non-functional VIs in LabVIEW and wire them up. The capbilities for making icons in LV are limiting (pre-8.0 at least - I haven't upgraded yet)

Mike

[LAVA 1.0 Content]

The vendors of T&M equipment should provide these, and for free! :beer:

A few years ago, I worked as a customer service engineer for a wireless telecom equipment manufacturer. I requested CAD drawings from the drafting department, then loaded them into Visio via DXF. I cleaned them up a bit, made stencils and added terminals for wiring. I put Visio drawings with these stencils into my PowerPoint training slides and the customer BEGGED me for the stencil. I gave it to them, and our competition ended up making stencils because this customer made it a REQUIREMENT.

For the most part, these types of drawings are already in their documentation (front panel, rear panel, etc) with the connectors. It's really a shame....

I don't necessarily advocate providing a specific file format (.vss), but maybe NI could add SVG or DXF files to the instrument drivers requirement checklist? It would only take one major player to include these to kick the others into "me too" mode

P.S. I've managed to "scrape" images from manufacturer's manuals. You can cut and paste from some PDFs and at least make a hookup diagram in your LabVIEW code look like the actual equipment. I put the image in a .MHT file with my instructions (create .MHT using MS-Word) and load it into an ActiveX control with a configurable "OK" and "Cancel" button.

EDIT OCT 11 2006

I posted a comment to one of Brian Powell's blog entries, and included a link to this thread. He replied that he was a bit concerned about the 'scraping' of images. I certainly respect and support copyrights; I suppose my use of the word "scrape" was a bit off. The cut-and-paste of an image from documentation for an instrument that I've purchased (and then use in code that communicates with said instrument) represents to me "fair use". The software does not function properly without the instrument.

( :laugh: I like to think that I'm preserving the equipment manufacturer's "image" by accurately portaying the "image" of their instrument :laugh: )