The Ladner group (Joe Batts, Weiming Qi, and Matt McKinney) has been hard at work building a field-deployable membrane unit. One key step in this process was creating Labview programs to control our peristaltic pumps. This is a common enough endeavor (especially for Masterflex pumps that are often used) that we thought there would be great examples available online. But we didn’t find any that clearly explained what to do. So here is what we came up with. Hopefully it will be useful for others. We\u2019ve done this on a few pumps, but the most recently purchased was Masterflex EW-07551-20. (Or just 07551-20; not sure if the EW is necessary).<\/p>\n
Our approach was to write two Labview programs (what Labview calls “virtual instruments” [VIs]); one to initialize the pump and one to control it. These are meant to be embedded in an umbrella program that controls and reads signals from all the other components in the system (flow meters, pressure gauges, etc.).<\/p>\n