As the title suggests, I'm putting together a trade study to determine if TestStand is "worth it", in terms of cost, bulk, and learning curve, in a system that will be mostly LabVIEW, with the occasional Python and DLL call. Assume for the moment that the team has some exposure to TestStand but are CLD's or better in LabVIEW.
- Does TestStand have an internal method to "hand off" data somehow from one step to another? For example, if a thing returns a string, can TestStand store that string in a general purpose buffer and hand it off to the next thing? Or, is that done with file I/O only?
- In LabVIEW, calling a DLL can be time consuming and is dependent on the DLL being properly documented. This is especially true if someone else wrote the C++ DLL and that person isn't available to help expose and explain the inputs/outputs, and in this case, you have to keep trying until you get it right. Does TestStand somehow make this process easier?
- It seems that the way TestStand works out of the box isn't conducive to multiple UUTs running at the same time. If I have 30 UUT's, how difficult is it for TestStand to pull in 30 UUT serial numbers at once, and then display all 30 running on the sequencer front panel?
- Can the stock TestSand sequencer window contain a section that constantly shows a few parallel processes like temperature, humidity, a count-down timer, etc? I'm not talking about running a window that is a LabVIEW VI.
- Is a TestStand deployed program (the user version you'd deploy to the production floor) have complicated licensing and runtime engine requirements? LabVIEW is easy in this regard, and hoping for same.
Thanks for any words of wisdom.