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Took my CLAD a couple of weeks ago at the NI Developer Day in Bristol and passed so I am well chuffed I did take it a couple of years ago, but NI lost the exam papers when they posted them back to the States. I am also due to do a small presentation (very small) at the London NI Days event, not sure quite how I found myself in that position as I am not used to doing that kind of thing, a little worried but looking forward to it as well Dannyt

Did not watch the videos but I can share some was that thought could be understood as valid. 1) DSA used to be a black art that only hardware could keep up with. THe software versions have covered that couldren for all but the most demanding apps. 2) With NI hardware working so reliably, the focus is on the actual science rather than the EE smoke and mirrors. Although these points are valid they aren't much different from the computers themselves where very few peolpe actually understand what is happening inside the CPU but make very good use of it lacking that familiarity. So we are equally walled-off from what it takes to smelt the metal we need to make nails. This is part of the evolution of technology and is equally a concern as our lack of knowlege re: growing our own food. On a similar note I finally made the decision to retire my "Scope Cart" (O'scope PS etc) from my work-shop just this week-end. Ben

Indeed. So Lets say you use MAX. They create 24 "tasks", set up values for scaling and calibrate each channel (probaly a good 1/2 days work). Then they want to change something on one of the tasks. Do they modify the original task? Or do they create a new task, set up the new scales and re-calibrate on the premiss that they don't want to "lose" the old settings because they might come back to it?.So now we may have 48 tasks Lets say they they keep to 24 tasks. Then they come to you and say "right, we want a piece of software that logs tasks 1,3,5,and 9 except on Wednesday, when we'll be using 1,6,12,8". How do you store that information in MAX? That's up to you. You'r the only one that knows what tests and what's required. I think what you will find (personally) is that you start off using MAX then as things progress you will find more and more you need to have more external control until you reach a point where you have so much code just to get get around MAX that it is no longer useful and, in fact, becomes a hindrance. But by that time you are committed. Thats just my personal experience and others may find it different. We actually use several files. One for Cal data, one for general settings (graph colours, user preferences etc, etc), one for each camera (there can be up to 5), one for DAQ (basic config) once for drive config and one for test criteria. The operator just selects a part number (or a set of tests if you like) from a drop down list and can either run full auto, or run specific test from another drop down list filtered for that product (well. Not filtered since it it just showing the labels in the test criteria file ). But having a directory structure makes that really easy, since all it is doing is selecting a set of files.I think that type of interface would be a bit further down your life-cycle. But the building blocks started out just as you are currently doing and all that we did was put them altogether in a nice fancy user interface (it even uses sub-panels to show some of the original UIs we created when testing the subsystems).

Ok this blew me away. How about making Free LabVIEW videos like the Guy from Khan Academy