So, this started out as an exercise to see if could get Microsoft Excel (through VBA) to directly talk to my Uniden scanner.
I’ve done this in labview quite a bit for a number of reasons. FreeScan is nice, but there’s times I want to be able to do things MY way.
After some mucking about, I got Excel to READ data, but writing just wasn’t happening…. so… I decided it was an opportunity to teach myself (through the help of the internet!) Python.
Overall, there’s a number of nuances I had to learn about the formatting, but it’s not too difficult when you get the hang of it. I’ve managed to revamp several of the features and commands that I used to be able to perform in LabVIEW. While I may resurrect that in the future, the flexibility that this allows (coding on the fly, etc., is nice. Additionally, some of my greatest coding breakthroughs for work came when playing with projects like this at home, when I was dabbling with LabVIEW for the lab. I don’t see myself coding python for work anytime soon, but at least I’l be a bit more familiar with the structure and methods if working with some of the test stations using Python in the background.
I got as far as a crude spectrum analyzer – here’s the plot output. I think some calibration may be in order, but it’s only been a few years since I did this work, even in LabVIEW.
