[volt-nuts] Way OT [WAS: do you like Labview in your labs?]

[Marvin E. Gozum]

Mea culpa for bringing up the thread, but to clarify my rationale, 
IMHO as I understand the needs:

Establishing a volt requires 3 things: hardware for creating and 
sustaining a volt, its accurate measurement, and tracking variations 
through time.  To assist collecting data and measure its variation, 
its best done in software.

Most discussion has initially centered on the building a stable a 
zener based volt.  For accurate measurement, there was discussion on 
the HP/Agilent 3458a, and other voltmeters.  But for tracking data 
through time, not much.  I had initiated a query on its need 6+ 
months ago, and this generated a set of replies with some nice graphs 
of volt/time over short duration, weeks or days.  And here we are at 
the details now.

The question I raise was directed purely on the use of Labview or 
write my own software, but it was related to the volt in this 
way.  On the software, the issue digressed but was strong related to 
whether a platform be open-source or commercial, and analogies to 
that, but this was pertinent to long term maintainability.

I currently have 5 months of initial observation data, and I'm moving 
to fully automate it so it requires minimal input from me and it just 
runs, as I need at least 1-2 years of data to confirm degree of 
seasonal variations.  This will best characterize ambient 
temperature, pressure and humidity variations on a simple zener volt 
reference; these phenomena have already been described in many 
metrology papers.



Sincerely,



Marv Gozum
Philadelphia, PA