interface miniLAB 1008 to Excel spreadsheet?

[[email protected]]

I'd like to interface my miniLAB 1008, a Measurement Computing USB data
acqusition system, to Windows Excel.

What I'd like to see is something that would make data from the daq show
up in particular cells in a spreadsheet and other cells that would serve as
controls such as scale factors and output data to be sent to the daq from a
spreadsheet.

My guess is that the "universal library" supplied with the miniLAB could
make this happen. However, my experience and programming skills are weak enough
that I don't know exactly how to get started.

Is my guess that it is possible to do something like this reasonable?
Has someone already done something similar? I might be able to figure it all
out for myself, given enough time, but a single peek at the answer is worth a
thousand guesses.

Anybody here who could give me any encouragement?

Jim

 

[Rob]

I'd like to interface my miniLAB 1008, a Measurement Computing USB data
acqusition system, to Windows Excel.

What I'd like to see is something that would make data from the daq show
up in particular cells in a spreadsheet and other cells that would serve as
controls such as scale factors and output data to be sent to the daq from a
spreadsheet.

My guess is that the "universal library" supplied with the miniLAB could
make this happen. However, my experience and programming skills are weak enough
that I don't know exactly how to get started.

Is my guess that it is possible to do something like this reasonable?
Has someone already done something similar? I might be able to figure it all
out for myself, given enough time, but a single peek at the answer is worth a
thousand guesses.

Anybody here who could give me any encouragement?

Jim

Jim assuming your USB hardware works via a virtual com port you may be able
to get something useful from the links below. I did a very rough job a while
back reading data from a PIC into Excel. It was a while back but I think I
got useful snippets from these sites.
rob

www.windmill.co.uk/excel.html
www.taltech.com/support/dde_sw/swDDEex.htm
http://www.aggsoft.com/asdl-capture-serial-data-excel.htm

 

[[email protected]]

Jim assuming your USB hardware works via a virtual com port you may be able
to get something useful from the links below. I did a very rough job a while
back reading data from a PIC into Excel. It was a while back but I think I
got useful snippets from these sites.
rob

www.windmill.co.uk/excel.html
www.taltech.com/support/dde_sw/swDDEex.htm
http://www.aggsoft.com/asdl-capture-serial-data-excel.htm

The manufacturer is not giving out many low level details about how the
instrument works, neither hardware nor software. There is a .dll driver file
and a "universal library" so that you can write your own applications in a
couple of "visual" languages. I was trying to avoid that since I already know
how to make Excel do almost everything I need to do.

I found a USB monitor utility at http://www.hhdsoftware.com yesterday.
I think that may let me find out how hard it will be to get the data into Excel.
I was very impressed with the program in the short time I had to look at it
after installation last night.

Jim