Leaderboard

Sir, TestStand is developed with C#, and my Sequence Toolkit was developed via LabVIEW from zero, and I posted it on this forum for the purpose of learning and communication. As a LabVIEW enthusiast who had ever worked at NI for several years, I don't understand why you said that.

Hello ladies and gentlemen! Prepare yourselves for a massive wall of text. Thank you in advance. First time poster, long time lurker. Over the last decade I have found answers to a myriad of Labview related questions I've had on these forums, and I'm hoping some of you can help me out with my current conundrum. I've a solo developer for a large labview based automation project. I have worked with other labview developers in the past, but we've always kept what we were working on very compartmentalized because nobody ever wanted to deal with LVMerge. At the time they all said Labview effectively had zero way to merge VIs. Since those old days (9 years ago) we've come a long way. Unfortunately like many engineers I am horrible about UI/UX design - I'm trying to fix basic functionality, I don't care that you can't find the button (at least I don't care right then). But because of how solid the software is getting we're finally in a good position to start dedicating time and effort into improving our UI flow and design. So in the run up to this, and knowing I had basically zero experience with LVMerge/Compare except that the previous developers considered it "impossible", I did a few tests. My goal was to continue some development in the block diagram of the main top level VI in my own git branch, while another developer worked on UX changes on a second git branch. Then when he was ready we'd merge everything back together. All of his changes were focused on the Front Panel - he never opened the block diagram once. He was moving things, resizing things, changing captions and boolean texts, but never labels, and then adding various decorations as he wanted for clarity and organization. My initial test merges worked flawlessly. I was surprised how easy my small merges worked. From there he tinkered away when he could over 4ish weeks on the UI and I kept my usual pace on the main top level working on various bugs. I tried to limit what I was doing in the top level - most of the block diagram changes I made were cosmetic. It needed some TLC. Anyway fast forward and now we're ready to merge everything back together and ... I can't. I cannot get it to work. I've tried so much stuff. At first the errors were almost always during the LVCompare phase, usually about an insane block diagram object on the "base" vi. I'm familiar with heap peak so after a crash I'd comb the error log as well as I could (wish that thing had some documentation) and then try to find the offending object and fix it. More often then not I wouldn't see an issue with the object at all, and lots of the advice online is "just delete and remake the object" but I hate that solution because it means I fundamentally don't understand the actual problem, and when I'm merging three different versions of a big VI that gets tough to do. I've been experimenting with the tools, and eventually turned off auto resolve. Okay cool that would get me through the compare stage and actually open LVMerge where I could select which versions of things I wanted. From here it became a game of cat and mouse where I go through changes one by one till I get a crash, investigate, fix, change something related to said crash, and then run it again. This has been time (and sanity) consuming. It never worked, and eventually I got stuck on a merge change that I couldn't even identify what it was changing between the three, but I know that no matter which I select it crashes. I've kept trying various things since then. Resizing the tab control positions to be exactly the same Deleting a few FP objects on the base and FP update versions that I had removed when making BP changes on my version Adding a few objects I created for the same reason Added all 3 versions of the VI to the main most up to date project, opening and running them all to make sure there are no serious insane objects that are breaking them. They all run. This is by no means an exhaustive list of everything I've tried, but its what comes to mind right now as the major tries. Currently the state I'm in is that when I run it with all 3 versions with all the changes from above made to them, I can't get through the Compare stage because it crashes with a insane object error about "undo.cpp" which makes zero sense to me. What is it undoing? I tried limiting the number of Undos in LV settings, that didnt help, I tried increasing the limit greatly, that also didn't work (maybe didn't increase enough? Trying that now). I'm really deep in the weeds on this one now, and I would love some fresh perspectives. What's probably going to happen is that I'm going to write it all off as a lesson, and we'll just have the UI dev make his changes again on my current most up to date version - but I would really love to figure out the compare and merge process, and best practices for using it. The documentation for these is abysmal. There's basically nothing. I could probably pay for NI's annual subscription and maybe get some direct help from them but I had it out pretty big with some NI sales guys a few years ago when they transitioned away from perpetual licenses to the subscription model, and I don't want to pay them on principle; but I will if needed. Ultimately even if we do the changes again, I'd still like some best practices on where we went wrong and how to avoid this in the future. We're growing fast, and I could see having another full time labview developer working with me in the future and would love to come away from this with as many answers as possible on how to work in a team on labview binary files. If you've made it this far all I can say is thank you. Now please send help. PS: some info I should of added we use Labview 2021. I don't think we're on SP1, I don't remember why not, and I am willing to try updating. also willing to pay the sub and just upgrade to 2025, but not without good reason like someone tells me all about how they solved so many issues with Compare/Merge in the last 4 years and its going to be so much better I'm attaching my most recent error log from the crash I had last night. Its a doozy, reporting a TON of objects on both the FP and BP as insane. lvlog2025-08-11-15-32-09.txt

I think this is fixed now. Please check.

I posted a demo set of VIs here which can pop up a window, centered on whatever monitor the mouse is on. There's also settings to have the window center on the mouse wherever it is, but saying on the same monitor. And yes this uses the All Screens, Working Area properties.

There is an Application property called Display->All Monitors. It will give you the pixel ranges of the monitors in your system. What I've done is to use the calling VI's position to figure out which monitor it was on and then place the new VI window as needed. You could use a win32 dll call to get the mouse position as well if that better meets your requirements.

When you send the message you encapsulate the message as a cluster of string and variant. You don't seem to unwrap the variant from the name/variant cluster in the receiver. What I expect to see is something like this in the receiver:

I used LabVIEW to develop a toolkit for ATE software. The toolkit is called "Test bench Framework", which includes a test sequence editor and a test engine.This toolkit features the ability to execute several different sequences in parallel.If you are interested in this kit please contact me, thank you! This toolkit is over 10MB in file size and cannot be published on VIPM, so I uploaded it to Github.Test-Bench-Framework . I used the TestStand icon inside my own sequence editor and wondered if there would be any copyright issues involved.But it's not commercially available yet.

MAT files are now just H5 files(HDF). Look at the library https://h5labview.sourceforge.io/ and find the example for writing a MAT file. You just need to add a special header in the beginning. I assume the dlls needed will work on Windows server, but am not sure.

You can add text labels to a dial. It does not turn it into an enum but sort of works like you would expect (change the data type to U8).

Which is funny because when I took them, I thought the CLD was much harder than the CLA.