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Hello all. The last 72 hours we've had some issues with spam bots taking over the forums, pretty aggressively. As a result new account creation has been temporarily disabled. Thanks to all those using the report feature. I don't read every post but I do read every new thread title and you are very helpful in spotting issues. There might be some forum upgrades taking place soon to help combat this issue. After which the new user creation will be turned back on. Nothing is scheduled yet but this is meant to be a heads up that the forums might have some down time soon and it is to be expected. Thanks for your patients.

Hello. I am not a bot... I'm planning on taking the site offline this weekend to perform long overdue upgrades and to investigate ways to curb the spam attacks. Thanks to everyone for all the help cleaning up the forums. Hopefully I can find a solution and we can get back to the usual next week.

I'm excited to release ViPER ViPER is an Object Oriented design Framework that supports dependency injection and recursive object creation. Systems are assembled at runtime from a collection of pre-built components defined by an Object Definition Document. Please visit the project on GitHub https://github.com/kurtafriday/ViPER I've presented this framework at several GLA Conferences, for an overview and guidance please view. GLA 2021 https://labviewwiki.org/wiki/GLA_Summit_2021/Open_Source_ViPER GLA 2020 https://labviewwiki.org/wiki/GLA_Summit_2020/ViPER_-_A_LabVIEW_Dependency_Injection_Framework This branch of ViPER has been used by us to develop systems in regulated industries for several years, it's solid and reliable, however its windows only. I'm working on ViPER_WinRT which is compatible with Windows and RT and we have already used it for several systems. I'll be releasing ViPER_WinRT in the coming months. I'll work to get ViPER onto the VIPM Tools Network soon. I'm looking forward to the feedback and I hope you enjoy and get value from this framework. Ping me if you have any questions. kurt@medulla.net

A is for Argumentative, right?

@hooovahh Is still weeding out the spam. I think he's in the eastern US time zone so he's 3 hrs. ahead of me ☺️. Much thanks to him. But I'm also improving the filters. Unfortunately, I think there are some sleeper accounts that were created before the changes that are starting to post. But, yes, I think it's getting much better. BTW, I just discovered that if you ctrl+right click a posted image you can set its' size! neat.

I noticed that this morning. However, I'm adjusting some knobs behind the scenes. There will still be some that get through and I will be monitoring the forums for the next few weeks to optimize the settings.

How about halfway happy. Which is more happy then I'd be with nothing. I enjoy a community that shares code. Sharing is caring. I'm agree that stuff on VIPM.IO should have a bit more polish. But a random forum post doesn't require the test and rigor of a commercial product.

A customer asked me to create a powerpoint explaining the advantages of LabVIEW. While putting together the practical rationales, just for grins I asked Chatgpt to create a presentation explaining the philosophy of LabVIEW in a Zen sort of way. Here is what it came up with. Zen_of_LabVIEW.pdf

0.6.0 version now on VIPM: https://www.vipm.io/package/jdp_science_postgresql/ This involves significant improvements, as well as Examples that work with a public postgres server (and thus work without needing Postgres installed). I am hoping this is close to a 1.0 version.

Says the account with "AI" right in the name. Hiding in plain sight! eta: In fact, you can't even pronounce it without saying "AI" - "A I va lee oh tis". Well, I can't, anyway...

I've had to disable all external services used to login to LAVA such as Google, Facebook etc. If you were using these services and now cannot login. Please send an email to s u p p o r t (at) l a v a g (dot) o r g with your login email address and I will reset your password so you can use the built-in login method. This is a permanent change moving forward. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Anyone else getting their popcorn? I cannot predict the future. And worrying about things I can't control gives me anxiety. So I'm just going to chug along as best as I can. My boss likes the work I do, and I like my job. I'll be mindful of industry changes. But at the moment I am not pivoting away from LabVIEW or NI if I can't help it.

Because I can immediately test the correctness of any of those VI's by pressing run and viewing the indicators. Nope. That's just a generalisation based on your specific workflow. If you have a bug, you may not know what VI it resides in and bugs can be introduced retrospectively because of changes in scope. Bugs can arise at any time when changes are made and not just in the VI you changed. If you are not using blackbox testing and relying on unit tests, your software definitely has bugs in it and your customers will find them before you do. Again. That's just your specific workflow. The idea of having "debugging sessions" is an anathema to me. I make a change, run it, make a change, run it. That's my workflow - inline testing while coding along with unit testing at the cycle end. The goal is to have zero failures in unit testing or, put it another way, unit and blackbox testing is the customer! Unlike most of the text languages; we have just-in-time compilation - use it. I can quantitively do that without running unit tests using a front panel. What's your metric for being happy that a VI works well without a front panel? Passes a unit test? It may be in the codebase for 30 years but when debugging I may need to use the suspend (see below) to trace another bug through that and many other VI's. There is a setting on subVI's that allow the FP to suspend the execution of a VI and allow modification of the data and run it over and over again while the rest of the system carries on. This is an invaluable feature which requires a front panel This is simply not true and is a fundamental misunderstanding of how exe's are compiled. Can't wait for the complaint about the LabVIEW garbage collector. We'll agree to disagree.

Good Read here, a bit depressing https://nihistory.com/nis-commitment-to-labview/

Test Stand is a test sequencer so what you have now isn't even in the same paradigm. In terms of LabVIEW, you have some limited block functionality that could be compared to Express VI's (which we don't use). From what I can tell, It seems to be the Python version of Node Red (Javascript). It has a place but people are very quickly going to be dropped into text coding for anything more than hobbyist applications. Many people on this forum (not me) are also adept Python Developers already and I expect they will weigh in sooner or later. If you are going to target the LabVIEW community, I would suggest you work on your videos. From what I can tell, they are pretty much: Plug in some wires Magic happens Trust me bro, the pretty pictures are because of the magic".

@Rolf Kalbermatter I know you did not mean this, but I love it!

In a previous life, I used to teach a CLD level class using this book, and enjoyed it a lot -- Some of it is certainly outdated at this point, but I think it still has a lot of solid info / strategies in it. I've attached the files as a .zip file to this post. Good luck! Effective LabVIEW Programming Files.zip

I have put some effort into improving the VI icons in Messenger Library, in hopes of making things clearer. I have particularly been trying to get rid of the magnifying glass icon, which was standing in for too many concepts. I have also tried to improve the Palettes by putting the standard VIs (that one would most commonly use) in the root-level palette: The 2.0 version also introduces Malleable API methods (the orange-coloured ones), which make code cleaner. If anyone could spare some time, it would help me to have feedback. Especially from people who have not used Messenger Library before, so I can get an idea if the key concepts come across. New 2.1.3 version is available here: https://forums.ni.com/t5/JDP-Science-Tools/New-icons-for-Messenger-Library/m-p/4412550#M192

Yes you can. The official form is at https://www.ni.com/en/forms/perpetual-software-licenses-labview.html Some things to keep in mind: There is a current promotion (valid till the end of December 2024) where those who used to have an SSP can renew it today as if the SSP never expired in the first place. That means you can get the latest version of LabVIEW, under a perpetual license, at a discounted price (compared to buying it "new"): https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/LabVIEW-subscription-model-for-2022/m-p/4398958#M1296289 Quotes/sales are now handled by external distributors, rather than Emerson/NI. Lots of people have reported that they didn't get a response to their quote requests, or didn't get the expected discount applied. If that's the case, message Ahmed Eisawy, the Director of Test Software Commercialization (who wrote the forum post in my link above) and he'll get it sorted out.

The 'Arrange VI Window' Quick Drop keyboard shortcut does this. With the diagram open, Press Ctrl-Space, then once Quick Drop appears, press Ctrl-F. If you want to look at the code that accomplishes this, see here... it should be a good resource for writing your own tool: [LabVIEW 20xx]\resource\dialog\QuickDrop\plugins\_Arrange VIWin SubVIs\Arrange VIWin - Arrange BD.vi

Because of a thread over on the darkside, I got the motivation to improve this code, and include the Google Material icons in it. I posted the package over on VIPM.IO. This uses the native 2D picture control for displaying icons like I wanted. It still requires Windows due to how icons are resized, but maybe that could be worked around if there is interest. https://www.vipm.io/package/hooovahh_boolean_vector_controls/ Install the package and its dependencies and you'll have a Tools >> Hooovahh >> Boolean Control Creation... Once ran it will start trying to display all the icons the toolkit installed. In the background it will be converting the vector images to 56x56 PNGs to be able to display them in the window. I tried being smart and having it prioritize icons that you scrolled to, but I honestly don't know how well it works. It basically takes about a minute after first launching it to have all of its icons displayed properly. You can use the tool during that minute but not all the icons will be available yet. From that point on you can scroll around and resize the window and it should work as expected, just a little bit slow at times. There is a single constant on the block diagram where you can change the icon side. At one point I had icon size be a control on the front panel but since it took about a minute to process all the images for every change I just left it. Some of the icons have multiple versions. If you left click on an icon and a window pops up you can pick from what version of that icon you'd like to use. Then create a control using that icon. You can theoretically put your own EMF files in the folder with the rest but at the moment it doesn't scan for new files since it is relatively slow to find all icons on every launch. What I'm saying is compromises had to be made. Maybe I could have a separate program that gets ran in the Post Install VI that starts processing the icons right away in parallel. That way the tool might be done processing icons by the time the user launches it for the first time. I did use the Post Install and Post Uninstall to do extra work since there are so many individual files. Normally you'd have VIPM handle the files but it took a long time. So the package just installs a Zip, and the Post Install will unzip them. This also means Post Uninstall needs to delete the extracted files. Not ideal but the install time was much longer otherwise.

Oh yeah it sucks. I do what I can, I contact the admin when there are issues I can't resolve. I appreciate your patients.

It does put more spam in my inbox. Honestly with how frequent things are I'd say make a single report of any kind, then I'll review all the posts by the newest users. Banning a user deletes all of their stuff, so just one report to get my attention is enough.

Thanks for cleaning up the mess. Let us know if we can help. In the meantime we'll provide moral support in the forms of memes

You guys are on point with the meme. So Snippets in general still work for me. I just tested one from NI's site and it was fine without needing to run as admin. That being said I know there were issues with LAVA and those might still exist. If I go to this NI post: https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/Serial-port-number-savings-in-ini-file-executable-with/m-p/3957698#M1126478 There is a snippet. If I drag that pictures to LabVIEW it doesn't work. If I right click the image and choose open in new tab, then drag that image, it also doesn't work...BUT If I take the URL which was this: https://forums.ni.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/251299iAB15C965246CD61E/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 and change it to this: https://forums.ni.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/251299iAB15C965246CD61E Then drag that to LabVIEW it does work.

LabVIEW has been my forte throughout my quarter-century or so of employment. It's what has made me most valuable to present and past employers, (and is what I enjoy doing the most). My only real concern at this point would be in finding another job within my purview, that wouldn't require me to relocate my family, should I not be able to continue working for my current employer. In the current state of things, I'm not concerned - but often wonder if I should be.

<EOM>

Pretty simple except if you need to resize the array in the C code. You can let LabVIEW create the necessary code for the function prototype and any datatypes. Create a VI with a Call Library Node, create all the parameters you want and configure their types. For parameters where you want to have LabVIEW datatypes passed to the C code, choose Adapt to Type. Then right click on the Call Library Node and select "Create C code". Select where to save the resulting file and voila. This would then look something like this: /* Call Library source file */ #include "extcode.h" #include "lv_prolog.h" /* Typedefs */ typedef struct { LStrHandle key; int32_t dataType; LStrHandle value; } TD2; typedef struct { int32_t dimSize; TD2 Cluster elt[1]; } TD1; typedef TD1 **TD1Hdl; #include "lv_epilog.h" void ReadData(uintptr_t connection, TD1Hdl data); void ReadData(uintptr_t connection, TD1Hdl data) { /* Insert code here */ } Personally I do not like the generic datatype names and I always rename them in a way like this: /* Call Library source file */ #include "extcode.h" #include "lv_prolog.h" /* Typedefs */ typedef struct { LStrHandle key; int32_t dataType; LStrHandle value; } KeyValuePairRec; typedef struct { int32_t dimSize; KeyValuePairRec elt[1]; } KeyValuePairArr; typedef KeyValuePairArr **KeyValuePairArrHdl; #include "lv_epilog.h" void ReadData(uintptr_t connection, KeyValuePairArrHdl data); void ReadData(uintptr_t connection, KeyValuePairArrHdl data) { int32_t i = 0; KeyValuePairRec *p = (*data)->elt; for (; i < (*data)->dimSize; i++, p++) { p->key; p->dataType; p->value; } }

I threw this together, and maybe someone will find it useful. I needed to be able to interact with cmd.exe a bit more than the native system exec.vi primitive offers. I used .NET to get the job done. Some notable capabilities: - User can see standard output and standard error in real-time - User can write a command to standard input - User can query if the process has completed - User can abort the process by sending a ctrl-C command Aborting the process was the trickiest part. I found a solution at the following article: http://stanislavs.org/stopping-command-line-applications-programatically-with-ctrl-c-events-from-net/#comment-2880 The ping demo illustrates this capability. In order to abort ping.exe from the command-line, the user needs to send a ctrl-c command. We achieve this by invoking KERNEL32 to attach a console to the process ID and then sending a ctrl-C command to the process. This is a clean solution that safely aborts ping.exe. The best part about this solution is that it doesn't require for any console prompts to be visible. An alternate solution was to start the cmd.exe process with a visible window, and then to issue a MainWindowClose command, but this required for a window to be visible. I put this code together to allow for me to better interact with HandbrakeCLI and FFMPEG. Enjoi NET_Proc.zip

I am actually working on it but it is a bit more involved than I had anticipated at first. There is a certain impedance mismatch between what a library like open62541 offers as interface, and what LabVIEW needs to be able to properly interface to. I can currently connect to a server and query the available nodes, but querying the node values is quite a bit of work to adapt the strict LabVIEW type system to a more dynamic data type interface like what OPC UA offers. More advanced things like publish-subscribe are an even more involved thing to solve in a LabVIEW friendly way. And I haven't even started interfacing to the server side of of the library!

After making someone's day on the NI forums last fall for yet another CRC variation, I decided to go look for a fully-implemented LabVIEW reuse library I could just link to for the next such request. I really couldn't find one. Hence, the attached. It's intended to be a user.lib reuse library (although the attached zip includes a small demo project with a test VI). There's really only about two genuine VIs in the library, both are malleable to adapt to the poly/init integer sizes. One is the CRC computation VIM and the other is a lookup table builder; you have the option of pay-as-you-go (eight shifts/tests and conditional XORs, aka "brute force"), or you can take the computational hit upfront once and build a lookup table. Outputs are tested correct for the lengthy list of "well-known" CRCs (included in the library as some handy typedef'd cluster constants), when tested against some reputable online calculators. What is NOT done: I haven't made any serious attempts at benchmarking performance, brute force vs. lookup table. I'd be happy to have the LAVA community beat this up and suggest improvements in: speed, code elegance, style, whatever. Dave CRC.zip

All I know is that if they don't do something to make it a more powerful language, it will be difficult to keep it going in the long run. It was, in the past always a powerful choice for cross-platform compatibility. With the macOS deprecating (and eventually completely removing) support for OpenGL/OpenCL, we see the demise of the original LabVIEW platform. I for one would like to see a much heavier support for Linux and Linux RT. Maybe provide an option to order PXI hardware with an Ubuntu OS, and make the installers easier to use (NI Package Manager for Linux, etc.). They could make the Linux version of the Package Manager available from the Ubuntu app store. I know they say the market for Linux isn't that big, but I believe it would be much bigger if they made it easier to use. I know my IT department and test system hardware managers would love to get rid of Windows entirely. Our mission control software all runs in Linux, but LabVIEW still has good value in rapid application development and instrument bus controls, etc. So we end up running hybrid systems that run Linux in a VM to operate the test executive software, and LabVIEW in Windows to control all our instruments and data buses. Allowing users the option to port the RT Linux OS to lower-cost hardware, they way did for the Phar Lap OS would certainly help out, also. BTW, is it too much to ask to make all the low-cost FPGA hardware from Digilent LabVIEW compatible? I can see IOT boards like the Arduino Portenta, with its 16-bit analog I/O seriously eating their lunch in the near future. ChatGPT is pretty good at churning out Arduino and RaspberryPi code that's not too bad. All of our younger staff uses Digilent boards for embedded stuff, programming it in C and VHDL using Vivado. The LabVIEW old-timers are losing work because the FPGA hardware is too expensive. We used to get by in the old days buying myRIOs for simpler apps on the bench. But that device has not been updated for a decade, and it's twice the price of the ZYBO. Who has 10K to spend on an FPGA card anymore, not to mention the $20K PXI computer to run it. Don't get me wrong, the PXI and CompactRIO (can we get a faster DIO module for the cRIO, please?), are still great choices for high performance and rugged environments. But not every job needs all that. Sometimes you need something inexpensive to fill the gaps. It seems as if NI has been willing to let all that go, and keep LabVIEW the role of selling their very expensive high-end hardware. But as low-cost hardware gets more and more powerful (see the Digilent ECLYPSE Z7), and high-end LV-compatible hardware gets more and more expensive, LabVIEW fades more and more I used to teach LabVIEW in a classroom setting many years ago. NI always had a few "propaganda" slides at the beginning of Basics I extolling the virtues of LabVIEW to the beginners. One of these slides touted "LabVIEW Everywhere" as the roadmap for the language, complete with pictures of everything from iOT hardware to appliances. The reality of that effort became the very expensive "LabVIEW Embedded" product that was vastly over-priced, bug-filled (never really worked), and only compatible with certain (Blackfin?) eval boards that were just plain terrible. It came and went in a flash, and the whole idea of "LabVIEW Everywhere" went with it. We had the sbRIOs, but their pricing and marketing (vastly over-priced, and targeted at the high-volume market) ensured they would not be widely adopted for one-off bench applications. Lower-cost FPGA evaluation hardware and the free Vivado WebPack has nearly killed LabVIEW FPGA. LabVIEW should be dominating. Instead you get this:

As a workaround, what about using the .NET control's own events? Mouse Event over .NET Controls.vi MouseDown CB.vi MouseMove CB.vi

I have had this in my toolbox for a long time to do what you are asking. It is part of a QuickDrop plugin I made to "fix up" a VI, similar to Darren's Nattify plugin. Size Diagram Window.vi

I was relieved to login this morning and not see pages worth of spam when I clicked on the "Unread Content" link. Awesome job to all!

Spoiler: don't do that on the weekend 😭

Thanks for keeping up the fight! I don't even want to imagine your inbox on a Monday...

I actually never bothered to click on that and simply assumed that it does the same as selecting the image 😅 Yes, this has been known for a long time. You wouldn't believe who reported it first 😄

You can NOT install LabVIEW RT on non-NI hardware without a license from NI! And they have so far hesitated or stalled to say if they ever plan to sell such a license. What you can do is install NI Linux RT on whatever hardware you care since the Linux kernel is GPL software. And that is also what the NI Github repository is about. To provide a means to fulfill the GPL requirement to have the source code to the GPL covered software accessible to any user. What the NI Linux RT Github repository does NOT contain are the LabVIEW RT runtime kernel , NI-VISA, NI-DAQmx, NI-this and NI-that since they are closed source software and the Linux kernel comes with a special GPL clause that allows people to build and distribute closed source software that runs on it. Quite some kernel folks would love to get rid of that clause and force everybody to open source everything everywhere, but that didn't even fully work for kernel drivers, where they did a lot of effort to prevent closed source drivers from being able to do high performance operations. The big point here is that NI Linux RT is NOT LabVIEW RT. The whole LabVIEW RT runtime and NI driver stack are closed source and you can not install it on random hardware without an according agreement from NI. If you install NI Linux RT on your Jetson hardware, what you basically get is a somewhat expensive Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone Black board with additional soft RT capabilities but no LabVIEW target support at all! And no, the LabVIEW Hobbyist Toolkit can't be easily repurposed to run with such a hardware either. It's support is limited to ARM Cortex A hardware platforms and you may be able to get the according schroot image installed and running on the Jetson, but that is an entirely different thing than getting NI Linux RT installed on the Jetson. It is legally questionable but maybe you could get away with it, but it is technically quite a suboptimal solution as the schroot environment in which the LabVIEW RT kernel is running is a limited non-RT capable virtual machine running on the normal Linux host on your Jetson.

Here is some info on what changes there are in the new release. https://www.ni.com/docs/en-US/bundle/upgrading-labview/page/labview-2024q1-changes.html This is not the major release of the year so there isn't too much to talk about. As for fixing the build issue I wouldn't hold your breath. I've already seen someone mention that the build for an lvlibp failed with error 1502. Cannot save a bad VI without its block diagram. But turning on debugging allowed it to build properly.

There is an App Builder API which will allow you to accomplish this task, but it is not officially supported by NI. The VIs are in [LabVIEW 20xx]\vi.lib\AppBuilder\AB_API, and there is an examples subfolder there with a few examples that should help you get started.

(Not to downplay the importance of standardization, but rather highlighting that it's hard. And as @VDB said the old ones will hang around for a lifetime)

I had a girlfriend like that. It turned out that her father used mix metaphors for comic effect but she didn't realise and thought it was the correct metaphor. When she said "everyone says it like that" what she meant was "my family says it like that"

I've always been suspicious of Google Trends because it doesn't give context. The following is C++ but I refuse to believe it's marching to oblivion. But it's fun to play with

Well. C++ is just as old and C is 10 years older - so go figure! The whole software discipline hasn't really moved on in the last 60 years (check this out!) and while I do see AI changing that, it's probably not in the way you think. If AI is to be instrumental to programming it must come up with a new way of programming that obsoletes all current languages-not automate existing languages. Software needs it's Einstein vs Newton moment and I've seen no sign of that coming from the industry itself. Instead we get more and more recycled and tweaked ideas which I like to call Potemkin Programming or Potemkin languages. I disagree. LabVIEW, so far, has been immune to AI but it has also been trapped in the Potemkin Programming paradigm (ooooh. PPP ). It needs another "Events" breakpoint (when they introduced the event structure and changed how we program). Of all the languages, LabVIEW has the potential to break out of the quagmire that all the other languages have languished in. What we don't need is imports from other languages making it just as bad as all the others. We need innovators (like the guy that invented malleable VI's for funsies) only in their 20's and 30's - not 70's.