Leaderboard

Overall it looks pretty good. As Eric mentioned you definitely want to add more documentation. I would also look pay attention to the alignment of your controls and indicators on your front panels. Also some of the controls and indicators on your subVI were not completely visible on the front panel. You should avoid using the "Use default value if unwired" on the terminals of structures. Avoid wires that flow backwards. I am not sure if NI cares or not but I noticed when I opened a few of the block diagrams for some of your subVIs the code was not center or fully visible. I had to scroll the block diagram. I would avoid doing this too. Good luck with your exam.

Over all it looks good. Make sure you add descriptions and tip strip documentation to all of the front panel controls on your main vi. You don't need to write a paragraph for each one, just a quick sentence or two. Add some labels on your wires on the block diagram, at least for the main wires. Add a few more diagram labes here and there, clean up a few wire bends, and eliminate the coercion dot on the Car Wash Indicator tunnel. None of that should take too long and will help boost your score. Good luck, and tell us how it went.

Nope, you set the reentrant type of the deamon VI, however LabVIEW 8.2 only supports plain reentrancy (reallocate), so you need to remove this property from you 8.2 version (I don't see any real harm done by creating a specific clone per structure, it is in a VI always active, and it will be killed when the VI is closed (I hope). However I couldn't find the rename option (8.2), how should I do a rename? I was hoping for F2, or a right click option. Ton

[speaking purely as a developer myself, not speaking in any way for NI for this post.] Oh, yeah, I've made this mistake before. Not with LV... another tool. In my case it was choosing to use Oracle (licensed to my employer) instead of MySQL (freeware tool). I left that employer and my tools were dead -- I had copies of all my databases, but no way to use them. In a case where I made the right decision, my copy of CorelDraw is mine, paid for out of my pocket, even though Iuse it frequently at work. NI probably would've bought Corel for me once I showed a need for it in my work, but all of my personal graphics projects are in Corel and I don't want to lose access to them if I everleave NI. Essentially, bsvingen faces a rather classic problem. He used a license registered to entity A to produce software for entity B, and now without access to person A's license, he's stuck without the ability to continue working on the project for entity B. The solution is not, IMHO, to say, "Never use the licensed tool, always use the free tool." The actual answer is, "Never start a project using tools that have licenses that differ from the owner of the project." In other words, if the project is for entity B, don't use entity A's licenses to develop it. So if this is my personal project, I need a personal license, rather than relying upon my office license, otherwise I end up one day not having access to that license. Is a personal copy of LV cheap? Heck no. But neither is a personal copy of a lot of cool software. I'd like to say, "use LV for everything it is appropriate for." But I'd also like to get a paycheck every couple weeks, which means LV costs money, which means "use LV if you can afford to use it in all the times where it is appropriate". It'd be nice if it were down around $250, like Visual Studio, but we don't have anywhere near the volume that MS does to be able to make back our expenses at that low a price. I don't think the licensing takes away from the *language* being a general purpose programming language -- by which I mean, if you have access to LV, you can use LV for any programming project, effectively and efficiently, to the same degree as any other programming language. Every language has its strengths and weaknesses, and LV's particular set of trade-offs are no worse than a lot of other languages. But I do agree with bsvingen that the licensing takes away from the development tool being a general purpose development tool -- by which I mean not all developers will have access to it. That's really what's at the heart of the open source/free software arguments, but while I definitely use open source stuff, and I've contributed back to a few open source projects, and I wrote a lot of shareware back in history, I don't think anyone has figured out how to pay a staff of programmers while charging nothing for the software.