With the Measure Serial Add-in for Microsoft Excel, you can control instruments and acquire data with the serial communications port on your computer directly from Microsoft Excel. With Measure, you can control any instrument with an RS-232 or RS-485 interface, such as electronic balances, meters, analyzers, calipers, and remote I/O modules.
You configure instrument settings, such as COM port connection, baud rate, data bits, and so on, with easy-to-use dialog boxes. Then you can create specific serial tasks to send or capture serial data from a connected instrument. You can also specify parsing algorithms, so you keep only the data that you want and discard the rest.
Click on the arrow button to continue.
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Introduction
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You access the Measure Serial Add-in through the Serial menu, which automatically appears in your Microsoft Excel menu bar when you install Measure.
Pull-down the Serial menu and select Instruments to configure a new instrument.
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Configuring an Instrument
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From this dialog box, you can configure Measure with serial communications parameters for controlling your particular serial instrument.
Click on the New button to configure a new instrument.
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Configuring an Instrument
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You can give your new instrument any name. For this example, you will simulate communication with an electronic balance.
Standard communication parameters, such as COM port, Baud Rate, Parity, Data, and Stop bits are all set from this dialog box.
Click on the arrow button to continue.
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Configuring an Instrument
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After you configure the communication parameters for your instrument, you can interactively test the connection to ensure that your instrument is operating correctly and communicating properly with your computer.
Click on the Test button to test the electronic balance.
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Testing Your Instrument Setup
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From this dialog box, you can interactively send data to your instrument based on the settings you made in the previous dialog box. You can then read the serial port to see whether the instrument is responding properly.
The simulated scale returns its readout value when you send it a P followed by a question mark (?).
Enter "P?" in the Transmit input box and then click on the Send Data button to send this string to the balance.
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Testing Your Instrument Setup
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Click on the Read Serial Port to read the response from the electronic balance.
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Testing Your Instrument Setup
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You see that the balance is communicating properly with the computer. The balance returned a reading of 5.323 LBS. The data is encoded within a number of carriage return characters (\13), line feed characters (\10), and space characters (\32). Later, when you use this balance in Measure tasks, you will learn how to parse this response string to keep only the important information and omit carriage returns and line feeds.
Click on the OK button to continue.
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Testing Your Instrument Setup
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Now that you have configured your electronic balance and tested its operation, click on the OK button to continue.
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Testing Your Instrument Setup
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Pull-down the Serial menu and select Tasks to configure a capture task for the electronic balance.
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Configuring Serial Tasks
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Click on the Capture button to define a capture task for the electronic balance.
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Configuring Serial Tasks
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Now you will create a capture task to transmit measurement values from the balance. As you learned earlier, the balance will return its readout value after you send it the P? message.
Enter P? in the Transmit input box.
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Configuring a Capture Task
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Now you must decide where in your worksheet you would like Measure to store the value retrieved from the balance. You can enter a worksheet cell address, or simply click on a cell with your mouse to specify an input starting point.
Click on the cell A1 to specify the upper-left cell for holding the retrieved data.
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Specifying the Worksheet Range
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The balance sends a carriage return and line feed character to Measure to show that it has finished sending its data.
Click on the Define Fields button to specify a parsing algorithm that will keep only the important information from the balance response string.
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Specifying the Worksheet Range
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From this dialog box, you specify which data fields in the instrument response to keep and which fields to discard. You can parse strings based on field widths or field delimiters, such as commas or tabs.
Click on the arrow button to continue.
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Defining Fields
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The response string from the electronic balance can be divided into the following five fields:
1. leading carriage return and line feed characters
2. the readout value
3. two spaces
4. the unit of measurement for the readout value
5. trailing carriage return and line feed characters
For this example, you can use the width of each field to determine how the string will be parsed.
Click on the Width button to define each field by its character width.
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Defining Fields
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For each field, you can specify a character width and set a flag to include or exclude it from the worksheet.
Click on the arrow button to continue.
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Defining Fields
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Now the parsing algorithm is complete. The initial carriage return and line feed characters are set up as Field 1, which is excluded from the worksheet. Field 2 contains the five characters that make up the actual balance readout value. This field will be placed in the worksheet.
As you can see, only two fields from the balance response string are kept: the readout value and the units.
Click on the OK button to continue.
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Defining Fields
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Now your capture task is complete. You have read values from the electronic balance and stored them in a worksheet cell.
Click on the OK button to continue.
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Defining Fields
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Notice that the Read Scale task is now available in the Task list.
Click on the Run button to test the Read Scale task.
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Running the Task
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Your serial task is successful! Notice that two fields were placed in your worksheet, the readout value and the units for the readout. Making multiple measurements with this task is easy -- specify more cells in your worksheet, and the task will automatically fill them with balance readings.
Click on the Edit button to edit the Read Scale task.
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Running the Task
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If you would like to make ten consecutive readings from the balance instead of just one, you can select ten cells in the worksheet. The task will automatically take ten readings to fill the cells with data.
Click on the arrow button to continue.
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Specifying Multiple Readings
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Now that ten cells are selected, click on the OK button to continue.
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Specifying Multiple Readings
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Click on the Run button to run the Read Scale task again.
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Specifying Multiple Readings
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Using these simple Measure dialog boxes, you can configure extensive serial communication transmit and capture tasks to control your instruments and acquire data over the RS-232 port in your computer. After you configure these tasks, you can add them to the Serial menu so anyone can quickly and easily invoke them to acquire data.
Click on the Serial menu to display the new task added to it.
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Running Tasks from the Serial Menu
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As you can see, the Read Scale task is now available under the Serial menu.
Click on the arrow button to complete this module.
