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GWatPE

Senior Member

Joined: 01/09/2006
Location: Australia
Posts: 2127

Posted: 01:18pm 16 Jun 2009

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I have spoken to several forum members including Gizmo, and have made some slight changes to the piclog VBapplication.

A few changes that will aid in long term logging are

1. The addition of Whours to the logging file.

The accumulated Watt hours represent most of the number crunching in the logging display window. This total is difficult to recalculate from the raw data, so I have added the accumulating number to the end of each log sequence.

2. The creation of a Whours log file.

This file is located in the same directory as the log data, and is updated whenever the logger is stopped, and at the end of each days logging. There is a date and time stamp associated with each record. This is a convenient way of recording the daily performance of a system, without having to recrunch all the log data.

3. tidied up the fields on the RHS of the graphing window.

Several of the numerical fields did not line up with the text descriptions.

Gizmo will determine if the mods can be added to the original program on this site.

So far, testing is looking promising.

Gordon.

become more energy aware

SparWeb

Senior Member

Joined: 17/04/2008
Location: Canada
Posts: 196

Posted: 06:35pm 17 Jun 2009

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I've never been able to reproduce the same Watthour figure afterward either. Thank you for taking the time, and I look forward to seeing a copy.

If I may suggest an aesthetic improvement, could you make the columns have constant decimal places? Right now it displays:

6
4.1
5.73

for data:

6.00
4.10
5.73

when:

6.0
4.1
5.7

...would be more appropriate for something like measuring current thru the shunt. Even one decimal place is optimistic when one is using a home-made shunt. Same goes for an anemometer and RPM; don't need decimal places there, and beyond the accuracy of the equipment.

There might be an opposite opinion on aesthetics.
If this is not an easy change to make, I won't worry. The numbers can be "fixed" in Excel afterward anyway.

Steven T. Fahey

GWatPE

Senior Member

Joined: 01/09/2006
Location: Australia
Posts: 2127

Posted: 02:28am 21 Jun 2009

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Hi sparweb,

The numbers display issue is a result of the VB round function. Could be done by converting all numbers to before decimal point and after, convert to text, and then display. A lot of overhead for not much benefit. There is also a format function that I have used before in my previous VB logging application. This produced a good layout in the stored data on disk.

I want to add a fair bit more to the piclog, like some more data error rejection. There are a lot of personal preference things, that would not be in the spirit of changing from Gizmo's. I will see what changes others may be interested in.

Gordon.

become more energy aware

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