In industry, the automatic control of a process often requires that there is a monitoring interface by which the human operator can observe the evolution of the variables. We had chosen the Labview to develop the monitoring application because this is an acquisition and processing signal environment. This environment also allows to easily design graphical-user interfaces (GUI) and programming can be done graphically, by linking some graphical blocks, equivalent to subroutines tested, consisting of tens or even hundreds of instructions in a usual programming language.
The PC communicates with the control interface via bidirectional RS232 serial bus using the protocol described in the previous section. As the speed of communication between the computer and the microcontroller is not sufficiently high in relation to the dynamics of the process, our PC application does not allow the control of the process. So, the PC application is used for monitoring purpose only.
Fig. 6 shows the functional signals of the RIP control loop recorded by Labview monitor application via RS232 serial bus.