Leaderboard

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

A is for Argumentative, right?

I spent a long time online with YouTube support and finally got to the bottom of it. The Channel is back, and all the links work!

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.

Phew that is a pretty strong opinion! Although I personally am not a fan of the overall style of DQMH none of my problems are with the scripting/wizards or placeholder text. I think any framework that tries to do "a lot" will be complicated... your own personal framework (which you likely find trivial to use) is likely to be a bit weird to others. DQMH is extremely popular for a reason... To paraphrase the words of a wiser person than I, "please don't yuck someone elses yum"

Many years ago I made a demo for myself on how to drag and drop clones of a graph. I wanted to show a transparent picture of the new graph window as soon as the drag started, to give the user immediate feedback of what the drag does and the window to be placed exactly where it is wanted. I think I found inspiration for that on ni.com or here back then, but now I cannot find my old demo, nor the examples that inspired me back then. Now I have an application where I want to spawn trends of a tag if you drag the tag out of listbox and I had to remake the code...(see video below). At first I tried to use mouse events to position the window, but I was unable to get a smooth movement that way. I searched the web for similar solutions and found one that used the Input device API to read mouse positions to move a window without a title and that seemed to be much smoother. The first demo I made for myself is attached here (run the demo and drag from the list...). It lacks a way to cancel the drag though; Once you start the drag you have a clone no matter what. dragtrends.mp4 Has anyone else made a similar feature? Perhaps where cancelling is handled too, and/or with a more generic design / framework? Drag window out of listbox - Saved in LV2018.zip

The examples you provide are invalid JSON, which makes it difficult to understand what you are actually trying to do. In your VI, the input data is a 2D array of string but the JSON output is completely different. Your first step should be to define the types you need to produce the expected JSON output. Afterwards you can map your input data to the output data and simply convert it to JSON. The structure of the inner-most object in your JSON appears to be the following: { "Type":"ABC", "IP":"192.168.0.0", "Port":111, "Still":1, "Register":"Register", "Address":12345, "SizeLength":1, "FET":2, "Size":"big", "Conversion":"small" } In LabVIEW, this can be represented by a cluster: When you convert this cluster to JSON, you'll get the output above. Now, the next level of your structure is a bit strange but can be solved in a similar manner. I assume that "1", "2", and "3" are instances of the object above: { "1": {}, "2": {}, "3": {} } So essentially, this is a cluster containing clusters: The approach for the next level is practically the same: { "TCP": {} } And finally, there can be multiple instances of that, which, again, works the same: { "EQ1": {}, "EQ2": {} } This is the final form as far as I can tell. Now you can use either JSONtext or LabVIEW's built-in Flatten To JSON function to convert it to JSON {"EQ1":{"TCP":{"1":{"Type":"ABC","IP":"192.168.0.0","Port":111,"Still":1,"Register":"Register","Address":12345,"SizeLength":1,"FET":2,"Size":"big","Conversion":"small"},"2":{"Type":"ABC","IP":"192.168.0.0","Port":111,"Still":1,"Register":"Register","Address":12345,"SizeLength":1,"FET":2,"Size":"big","Conversion":"small"},"3":{"Type":"ABC","IP":"192.168.0.0","Port":111,"Still":1,"Register":"Register","Address":12345,"SizeLength":1,"FET":2,"Size":"big","Conversion":"small"}}},"EQ2":{"TCP":{"1":{"Type":"ABC","IP":"192.168.0.0","Port":111,"Still":1,"Register":"Register","Address":12345,"SizeLength":1,"FET":2,"Size":"big","Conversion":"small"},"2":{"Type":"ABC","IP":"192.168.0.0","Port":111,"Still":1,"Register":"Register","Address":12345,"SizeLength":1,"FET":2,"Size":"big","Conversion":"small"},"3":{"Type":"ABC","IP":"192.168.0.0","Port":111,"Still":1,"Register":"Register","Address":12345,"SizeLength":1,"FET":2,"Size":"big","Conversion":"small"}}}} The mapping of your input data should be straight forward.

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

I once went for an interview where they gave me a coding test and asked me to modify it. It was a very long time ago so I don't remember the exact modification they wanted (nothing to do with memory leaks) but I do remember the obtain queue and read queue inside a while loop with the release queue outside. I asked if they wanted me to also fix the memory leak as well as the modifications and they were a little puzzled until I explained what you have just said. I must have seen (and fixed) this while-loop bug-pattern a thousand times since then in various code bases. I also created this VI which I generally use instead of the primitives as it intialises on first call, can be called from anywhere, and prevents most foot-shooting by rolling them all into a single VI and ensuring all references but 1 are closed after use. Queue.vi

Those aren't typo's and errors. They are tests to see if we are paying attention.

In the past I have used the IMAQ drivers for getting the image, which on its own does not require any additional runtime license. It is one of those lesser known secrets that acquiring and saving the image is free, but any of the useful tools have a development, and deployment license associated with it. I've also had mild success with leveraging VLC. Here is the library I used in the past, and here is another one I haven't used but looks promising. With these you can have a live stream of a camera as long as VLC can talk to it, and then pretty easily save snapshots. EDIT: The NI software for getting images through IMAQ for free is called "NI Vision Common Resources". This LAVA thread is where I first learned about it.

Just to share how I got around this: By deleting 1 front panel item at a time I found that one single control was causing PaneRelief to crash; an XY graph. Setting it temporarily to not scale and replacing it with a standard XY graph (the one I had had some colours set to transparent etc) was enough to avoid having PaneRelief crash LabVIEW, but it would now just present a timeout error: I found a way arund this too though: the VI in question was member of a DQMH lvlib that probably added a lot of complexity for PaneRelief. With a copy saved as a non-member it worked: I could replace the graph, edit the splitters with PaneRelief without the timeout error (even setting the size to 0), then copy back the original graph replacing the temporary one, and finally move the copy back into the lvlib and swap it with the original. Voila! What a Relief... 😉 I probably have to repeat this whole ordeal if I ever need to readjust the splitters in that VI with PaneRelief though 😮

I confirm that this license is nearly identical to the standard EULA we use for our commercial products. Some wording is not applicable to a distributed palette of VIs like this. Our intention was to share a few reusable tools, used internally, with the community. Ideally, we should have released them under a standard open-source license such as MIT or a similar option. These VIs have been released “as-is,” without support or any guarantee that they will function for your specific use case. You may need to troubleshoot or fix any issues on your own. Feel free to use them in any context. I’ll look into whether it's possible to update the packages on the tool network to replace the current license with a more standard open-source one.

I put a temporary ban on inserting external links in posts (except from a safe list). We'll see what affect it has.

This is the modern 2020's equivalent of "works for me".

Your reporting of spam is helpful. And just like you are doing one report per user is enough since I ban the user and all their posts are deleted. If spam gets too frequent I notify Michael and he tweaks dials behind the scene to try to help. This might be by looking at and temporarily banning new accounts from IP blocks, countries, or banning key words in posts. He also will upgrade the forum's platform tools occasionally and it gets better at detecting and rejecting spam.

Apparently they moved it under Visible Items Edit: This also affects other types of structures.

Well, there are two aspects. The first is the technical one from hackers diving into the software and unhiding things that NI felt were not ready for prime time, to complicated for simple users, or possibly also to powerful. The main reason definitely always is however: if we release that, we have to spend a lot more effort to make it a finished feature (a feature for internal use where you can tell your users: "sorry that was not meant to be used in the way you just tried") is maybe 10 - 20% of development time than the finished feature for public use. There is also support required. That costs money in terms of substantial extra development, end user quality documentation (a simple notepad file doesn't cut it), maintenance and fixing things if something does not match the documented behaviour. And yes I'm aware they don't always fix bugs immediately (or ever) but the premise is, that releasing a feature causes a lot of additional costs and obligations, if you want to or not. The other aspect is, if someone who is an active partner and has active contacts with various people at NI, he is infinitely more likely to be able to influence decisions at NI than the greatest hacker doing his thing in his attic and never talking with anyone from NI. In that sense it is very likely that Jim having talked with a few people at NI has done a lot more to make NI release this feature eventually, than 20 hackers throwing every single "secret" about this feature on the street. In that sense the term "forcing NI's hands" is maybe a bit inaccurate. He didn't force them, but led them to see the light! Not out of pure selfless love, but to be able to officially use that feature for himself. The according Right-Click framework was a proof of concept to see how this feature can be used and mainly an example to other users how it can be used, and indeed once it worked it had fulfilled its purpose. That it was not maintained afterwards is not specifically JKI's fault. It is open source, so anyone could have picked up the baton, if they felt it was so valuable for them. The problem with many libraries is actually, if they are not open source and free, many complain about that, if it is open source and/or free, they still expect full support for it! In that sense I have seen a nice little remark recently:

Well, you are missing some important details in "The story of how this came about". So maybe indeed "it is worth a post of its own". It was LabVIEW 7.0 where they forgot to put a password on one of the VIs shipped with LabVIEW. And that VI had some node(s) on its block diagram including, I think, the BD reference property for the VI class. The community indeed got excited. But what did NI do? They tried to hide everything again in LabVIEW 7.1! I made a joke then that "our mother" NI must had had a PMS so she put the most interesting toys on a top shelf. So I made a"ladder" for us, kids, to get to them again and called it hviewlabs was me then, because that was a name of my company I used to sell my LabHSM Toolkit, an actor framework with actors controlled by hierarchical state machines (statecharts), long before the Statechart toolkit by NI, "THE Actor Framework", DQMH, and even before LVOOP. After PJM_Labview has published his private class generator http://forums.lavag.org/index.php?showtopic=307&hl=# and class hierarchies http://forums.lavag.org/index.php?showtopic=2161# and http://forums.lavag.org/index.php?showtopic=314&hl=hierarchy# (neither topic is available anymore) it became clear how to get access to private classes, properties and methods. However, it wasn't convenient enough. My PMS Assistant made it really easy. It gave back the access to those features to a much wider community of LabVIEW enthusiasts As you can see from the PMS topic discussion, by that time brian175 already had made his DataAct Class Browser. And he got really excited about the possibility not only browse but also to actually create objects, property and method nodes with the properties and method NI didn't want the users to see. By April of the same 2006 he figured out object creation too and incorporated the capabilities of PMS Assistant into DataAct Class Browser. At that point, I guess, NI decided that "the cat is out of the bag" and there is no point to resist. Nevertheless even after VI Scripting was made released by NI some classes, and even some properties and methods of public classes remain hidden even in LabVIEW 2024. I wonder why DataAct Class Browser is no longer available (as of January 2025) as well as original findings by PJM_Labview even here, on LavaG. Did NI "politely asked" admins to remove all that and just forgot about my PMS Assistant?

Unfortunately, many of those are bots. I've disable user:pages long time ago, because of the spam. If there's anyone that deserves a lot of credit lately it's @LogMAN. He's doing amazing work cleaning up the pages and adding/editing content. There's a push recently from NI to support the Wiki and promote its use to the broader community and within NI internally as well. So, we should see more traffic and more activity than usual, which is great. This is one of the reasons for the recent stability updates. I encourage everyone here on LAVA to find whatever LabVIEW topic they are passionate about and start adding some pages or even fleshing out some existing content that needs improvement. One way to start would be to find some information that you always wish NI had easily available on their website but could never get easy access to. Then create that on the Wiki.

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

This toolkit offer you an efficient, stable, and reliable front panel control value refresh function. User can design their UI dashboard without any code development. 1. Powerful parallel execution capability, Support clone reentrant execution running mode, you can create multi dashboard UIs at the same time and controls can synchronous refresh across different UI. 2. High-speed data refresh capability, even with thousands of controls on a single UI, can easily maintain a refresh rate of 50ms while consuming very little CPU resources. 3. Support all control data types that "Tag Engine" support, this mean the only thing you need to do is to change the control "Label" with "Tag name", then the control will refresh automatically. 4. Support "muParser Expression", you can type the control "Label" with "Expression" that muParser Expression support, For example "a + b" "a > 1 & b >= 2".

I would suggest rabbitmq, i want(ed) to present it at a LabVIEW user group (LUGE) but haven't done it yet. It's very powerful. I use redis and did a quick presentation (in french) at LUGE recently, i haven't used the stream feature though, I only used it as cache.

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:

If the child classes are statically linked in the code (via class constants, or whatever other mechanism you use), then this approach should always work, because the child classes will always be in memory.

Had the same issue. Removing a VI from a lvlib, using Pane Relief to set splitter size and moving it back to the the lvlib worked for me to. Thanks!

I have experienced the same thing when my VI was the member of a large class. I removed the VI from the class, set the splitter positions, and then added it back to the class. :shrug:

Indeed. It's not a full solution as it doesn't support multiple streams, audio or other encoding types. But if you want to get the audio then you need to add the decoding case (parse is the nomenclature used here) for the audio packets in the read payload case structure.

If you look at the actual array sizes, things will make a lot more sense. 1. The Build Array will add the number of expanded elements to the first dimension. The array size after the first Build Array is (2,0), which is still an empty array. 2. The Transpose Array will swap the array sizes. The array size after the Transpose Array is (0,2), which is still an empty array. 3. Again, the Build Array will add the number of expanded elements to the first dimension. In this case, it will add 1 to the first dimension, resulting in the array size being (1,2), which is no longer an empty array.

To analyze large time series remotely I have a client application that splits the data transfer using two methods; It will break down the periods into subperiods that is then assembled into the full period by the receiver *and* if the subperiods are too large as well they are retrieved gradually (interlaced) by transferring decimated sets with a decimation offset. So, as a result of this I need to merge multiple overlapping fragments of time series (X and Y array sets). My base solution for this just concatinates two sets, sorts the result based on the time (X values) and finally removes duplicate samples (XY pairs) from it. This is simple to do with OpenG array VIs (sort 1D and remove duplicates VIs) or the improved VIM-versions from @hooovahh, but this is not optimal. My first optimized version runs through the two XY sets in a for-loop instead, a for loop that picks consecutive unique values from either of the two sets until there are no such entries left. This solution is typically 12-15 times faster than the base case (<10 ms to merge two sets into one set with 250 000 samples on my computer e.g.). Has anyone else made or seen a solution for this before? It is not as generic as the array operations covered by the OpenG array library e.g., but it still seems like something many people might need to do here and there...(I had VIs in my collection to stitch consecutive time series together with some overlap, but not any that handles interlacing as well). It would be interesting to see how optimized and/or generalized it could be solved. I have attached the two mentioned examples here , they are not thorougly tested yet, but just as a reference (VIMs included just in case...). Below is a picture of the front panel showing an example of the result they produce with two given XY sets (in this case overlapping samples do not share the same value, but this is done just to illustrate what Y value it has picked when boths sets have entries for the same X (time) value): Merging XY series LV2022.zip

Setting up the project:

I fixed the issue. It was actually kind of funny. So there's a security rule on the server to protect against SQL injection. It found a match with "User_group". I guess it thought someone was trying to get the user data from the database? 😁 I added an exception. All good now.

There is a list of discord servers on the wiki: https://labviewwiki.org/wiki/LabVIEW_Community_Managed_Discord_Servers

The comfyUI nodes are described by JSON in files called "Workflows" so we could import them and use scripting to create nodes. That's if we want parity. But we could support nesting which ComfUI wouldn't understand. The WebUI's are just interfaces to create REST requests which we can easily do already. I'm just trying to find a proper API specification or something that enables me to know the JSON format for the various requests. Like most of these things, there are just thousands of Github "apps" all doing something different because they use different plugins. Modern programmers can do wonderful things but it's all built on tribal knowledge which you are expected to reverse engineer. The only proper API documentation I have found so far is for the Web Services which isn't what I want - I'm running it locally.

As of yesterday, November 18, the Perpetual licenses for LabVIEW and LabVIEW+ are officially back and should be directly orderable through the normal LabVIEW order page . But yes compared to before when the subscription was pushed down our throat the costs have significantly increased. I would say it is almost a 2.5* price increase if I remember correctly. The current Professional Developer price is higher than what the Developer Suite used to be back then, which also included LabVIEW Realtime and LabVIEW FPGA and just about any possible toolkit there was.

It's not listed in https://www.ni.com/en/support/documentation/bugs/24/labview-2024-q3-bug-fixes.html As LabVIEW user I feel happy for their attention to this. As OpenG ZIP developer I feel a bit cheated. 😁

@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.

A little while ago I posted some code on how to create boolean controls with images that scale well because the images are vector based and can scale up or down better than a static image like a PNG. After making that I made a utility that allows for selecting an image, and a control template and it creates the control. I showed this off to Danielle Hamburger and she encouraged me to clean it up and post it to the community. I'm still putting this in the In Development section just because there are several external tools needed that working around would be ideal if this were to be finished but for now it works and I use it often. So it works like you'd think. There is a library of vector images you select from, pick the one you want, then pick the Control Type (which is a folder of CTLs), then click create and it creates the control setting the decal button, VI description (adding License text if needed) and sets the icon editor icon. Dependencies If you just run the Vector Boolean Control Creator you'll need OpenG Time, OpenG File, and the JKI State Machine toolkit installed in LabVIEW 2015 or newer. The included libraries will work without anything else as long as you are in Windows (more on that later). If you want to include your own controls there are a few more steps and I left a text file explaining that in the Template Controls folder, but I included several already. If you want to add your own images I also left instructions in the Libraries folder. I wrote a VI that can convert from SVGs to the needed PNG and EMF files as long as you download inkscape (again instruction text files included). But inkscape is only a dependency if you want to use that utility to add your own libraries which are in SVG. Demo For good measure I made a Jing video showing how it works. Windows Only... So the Windows only part is an interesting one. I started with my UI being just a single 2D picture control and as you type your search in the top, it would go and open each image that matched the result, shift them into rows and columns, detect the number of columns shown, then detect and show mouse selection, and all the other stuff that would be needed. To say the least it was slow. I tried several ways to improve it, but in the end it was slow and I couldn't come up with a solution I liked. I could have added a search button but I really like the live search of typing it in and seeing it update as you type just like the icon editor glyphs do. So for a first release I went with the cheap and hacky solution and that was to leverage some .Net to embed a Windows Explorer window into my front panel, which is just the search results of a folder on disk. This now means you see the PNG images on the front panel, but it will only use that to show the UI to you, but then use the vector based EMF file when creating the control. Doing the search was a bit weird too since I couldn't figure out how invoke a search with the Explorer .Net so instead I wrote to a temp location a saved search that is XML, which I tell the UI to navigate to which then shows the search results. Oh and there is some .Net GDI resize going on so the PNG image is used as icon editor icon for the control but dependency could likely be removed with some G work. Anyway hope people find this useful. Vector Boolean Creator.zip

I can confirm that LabVIEW 2018 SP1 f4 (32-bit) automatically selects LabVIEW Runtime 2018 SP1 f5 when "automatically select recommended installers" is checked and LabVIEW Runtime 2018 SP1 f5 is installed. Though, it does not ask for the installer source. There used to be SFX installers that were extracted to "C:\National Instruments Downloads". When such an installer was used, the destination folder must not be deleted as it is used as a source location when creating installers in LabVIEW. Perhaps you installed the runtime engine through an old SFX installer and deleted those files at some point?

There are several alternatives for the NI GPU Toolkit that are considerably more up to date and actually still maintained. https://www.ngene.co/gpu-toolkit-for-labview https://www.g2cpu.com/

I am glad that didn't ve time to install NXG 😀

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.

Well that's okay I felt like doing some improvements on the image manipulation code. Attached is an improved version that supports ico and tif files and allows to select an image from within the file. For ico files it basically grabs the one image you select (with Image Index) and make an array of bytes that is a ico file with only that image in it, and then displays it in the picture box. For Tif files there is a .Net method for selecting the image which for some reason doesn't work on ico files. Edit: Updated to work with Tifs as well. Image Manipulation With Ico and Tif.zip

I think that's what the function does behind the scene. A rectangle is simply one case of any number of geometries you can make with this function's inputs. NI Vision rotation algorithm is more complete because it will interpolate colours when the rotated pixel positions are not integers, but otherwise it's the same. The rotation matrix in 2D is exactly what you state above. Rotation of points.vi