Custom probes

[Olivier Jourdan]

Hello all,

Just a small message to tell you that we have shared a small package of custom probes here.

This is not revolutionary, we just hope that it'll help you to find and fix bugs in your code.

Regards,

Olivier

P-S : LabVIEW 8.6 or later and VIPM 2010 needed.

[Olivier Jourdan]

Hi all, SAPHIR custom probes are now available through VIPM (with some updates).

1. Check available packages
2. Install ViBox - Probes
3. use them

Just a quick view of some of them in this videoUsingProbe.swfOlivier

[Olivier Jourdan]

Hello,

I'm currently updating our probe add-on with really awesome probes designed by a colleague who need to deals with 1D or 2D array and string display.

The goal is to obtain an easy and quick way to display and navigate array with the possibility to monitor more than 1 array element.

In addition we have had the capability to string probes to change the display from normal to hex or code display.

You can see a small demo on this video

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[asbo]

Those are pretty cool - the re-sizable array one is awesome. I really wish the NI probe did that by default.

[Ravi Beniwal]

Hi Olivier,

I created a custom probe for my Queues a while ago. Please feel free to include it in your tool, if you see a fit. This especially helps while monitoring the execution of a consumer loop in a queued message handler. You can slow the execution down so you can actually read the queued messages.

The code is pretty simple, but has helped me a lot.

Message Queue Probe.vi

[Olivier Jourdan]

Those are pretty cool - the re-sizable array one is awesome. I really wish the NI probe did that by default.

What a nice compliment

Hi Olivier, I created a custom probe for my Queues a while ago. Please feel free to include it in your tool, if you see a fit. This especially helps while monitoring the execution of a consumer loop in a queued message handler. You can slow the execution down so you can actually read the queued messages. The code is pretty simple, but has helped me a lot. Message Queue Probe.vi

Thank you for sharing that. We also have this kind of probe. To package it, I'm wondering which type of queue we need to handle ? String and Variant cluster is essential, but is there other useful type that should be addressed by this kind of probe? I'd be curious to know developers opinion.

Olivier

[Olivier Jourdan]

Here it is ! You can download the last version of SAPHIR probes (I hope that the update will be available directly through VIPM next week).

The package contain the new probes presented in this post, with a few enhancement.

We've also added probe named Chronograph. As the one presented in this post by MikaelH, Chronograph probe allows you to measure time between it and any other SAPHIR probes.

It could be very useful for a quick code execution time checking.

Finally, we've tried to standardize every probes ui in order to have resizing capabilities and add "freeze" and "clear" graph button when it was necessary.

Hope you'll enjoy this new package. If so, feel free to leave a comment here.

Note about ui rendering on Windows Seven : Probes was originally designed on Windows XP. Using them on Windows 7, we've came across some ugly ui rendering following OS display settings.

You can see the worst example below :

History probe under XP : Same probe under 7 :

We've tried to mange it as best as we've can, feel free to give us feedback on this point.

Olivier.

saphir_lib_vibox_probes-1.2.0.18.vip

[Olivier Jourdan]

Just to give an update, the last version (1.2.0.18) of the package is now available through VIPM Community edition

[Ravi Beniwal]

...

Note about ui rendering on Windows Seven : Probes was originally designed on Windows XP. Using them on Windows 7, we've came across some ugly ui rendering following OS display settings.

...

We've tried to mange it as best as we've can, feel free to give us feedback on this point.

Hi Olivier,

I ran into these issues recently. Like all generalizations, this one may be wrong, but here was my observation!

When you are switching from an XP machine to a Win7 machine, there is a pretty good chance that you are also moving to a higher resolution screen. I noticed that the system and dialog font on Win7 machines are set to a larger font then XP machines so that the physical size of the letters doesn't get too small on the higer resolution screens.

To accommodate this larger test, all controls grow (and not always nicely), overlap, and just look weird.

In this case, since the probes will always be used by nice friends like us and not in delivered products to customers (where you don't know who dislikes what), you can safely change the font on all text on the probes to a common fixed font like Tahoma 13pt or something. Within the development environment, we care more about getting access to the right information for debugging and wouldn't mind that you deviated from the recommended Dialog or System font.

[Olivier Jourdan]

since the probes will always be used by nice friends like us and not in delivered products to customers (where you don't know who dislikes what), you can safely change the font on all text on the probes to a common fixed font like Tahoma 13pt or something. Within the development environment, we care more about getting access to the right information for debugging and wouldn't mind that you deviated from the recommended Dialog or System font.

I was thinking about doing this font change, but I'll wait to see if there is feedback on this issue to decide if it's worth the work (there is almost 100 VIs to modify !)

Anyway, thank you for sharing your idea.

Olivier

[mathilde38]

 

Hello all,

 

A new version of SAPHIR probes is available!

 

New features are : 

- Support for LabVIEW RT

- History probe for Enums

- History probe for Errors

- String size indicator in the history probe for Strings

- And some minor modifications

 

You can view these new features in this video : http://youtu.be/_JzvS4r6yiw.

 

And you can install or update your toolkit via VIPM : vipm://saphir_lib_vibox_probes, or by downloading it there : http://www.saphir.fr/ftp/telechargements/saphir_lib_vibox_probes-1.5.1.36.vip.

 

Regards,

 

Mathilde

Edited January 26, 2015 by mathilde38