Workspace operations, access to workspace information

[DigilentFan]

Hello Digilent specialiststs!

I am working with 2 D³s and one NI VirtualBench, all 3 controlled by separate instances of Waveforms. Saving and reloading workspaces works fine for all of them.

To automate measurements it would be favorable to modify the ".dwf3work" files and reload them programmatically. Up to now I could not find a way to get these files in a human readable format to edit the workspaces (i.e. test setups). Further I could not find a way to import the workspaces to my planned application (in Python).

My favored way would be:

1. Setup measurements by the Waveforms instances (since setup by GUIs is very user friendly, fast and well (reproducible) documented by the “.dwf3work” files)
2. Save the workspaces for every test and Waveforms instance
3. Write code (for e.g. in Python) to recall workspaces (from 2.), perform the measurement and process measurement data for every test.

This would be a good trade-off of test development time, test duration and test cost for my project.

Off course it is clear, that you could setup the whole tests in Python (with the API) without the Waveforms UI. And it might be possible to perform it by “script” in waveform, but I am afraid to run into script’s limitations …

I am convinced, the graphical setup and automated reload would speed up my work and improve test documentation if the workspaces are human readable (or could be may human readable).

 

All references and suggestions are welcome,

thank you in advance

[attila]

Hi @DigilentFan

If you are using one device and once WaveForms instance you could use the application arguments, see WF app/ Help tab/ WaveForms 
Like: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Digilent\WaveForms3\WaveForms.exe myworks.dwf3work -runscript"
with a script to control the instruments, process, export data...

You could also call external applications from the WF app/ Script tool, see WF app/ Help tab/ Script/ Tool.exec .start

You could use the dwfcmd command line application to control device, generate signal, capture data... with simple commands
see: C:\Program Files (x86)\Digilent\WaveFormsSDK\samples\dwfcmd\ dwfcmd.exe help
or $ dwfcmd help
 

[DigilentFan]

Hello Attila,

thanks for your immediate response, resuming the possibilities to control the discoveries without Waveforms. The information how to save the setup information in a readable format is missing, maybe because Waveforms does not support it. For the VirtualBench the configuration is accessible as attached.

Is there no (hidden?) feature to make (save) the workspaces also human readableVB8012_.vbconfigVB8012_.vbconfigVB8012_.vbconfig for the discoveries? 

[attila]

Hi @DigilentFan

The workspace archives can be extracted/compressed with the WaveForms application Workspace menu.
The config.ini contains the application settings and various data are stored in separate directories/files for each instrument.

[attila]

Hi @DigilentFan

The new version improves the argument operations, adds multiple app support and loading config.ini