Louis Manfredi

Hi Justin: I've had bad luck controlling serial hardware through a USB-serial adaptor. Changing the computer to one with a real, built in serial port made the problem go away. If you are working with a computer with a built in serial port, try changing the hardware buffering settings under the Advanced... control for setting the serial port. Not sure if that trick might also help with a USB based port. Best Luck, Louis

QUOTE(rolfk @ Sep 19 2007, 02:19 AM) Of course, not such a bad approach-- once you've been programming in any language for a while, the trade-off between time spent learning the new (or old) features & shortcuts and time saved using them begins to heavily favor working with what you've got. At the absurd extreme, there isn't anything you can do with LabVIEW that couldn't be done programming a fast processor with perhaps an eight instruction subset of it's assembly language, given time to write code... But this N terminal thing does seem basic enough that it ought to show up when you call for detailed help from the <ctrl-H> window. Louis

QUOTE(rolfk @ Sep 15 2007, 02:38 PM) Thanks Rolf-- makes sense, wasn't there when I first started with 1.x on the Mac, then I was away from LV awhile doing other kinds of engineering, then back at Version 3.x or so in Windoze, so it went from non-existant to old news without me noticing. --Which just goes to show, my original point-- seems too bad that I have to rely on 3rd party sources of info, like LAVA, for this kind of thing. What other neat features are out there that I don't know about? Best, Louis

QUOTE(Aristos Queue @ Sep 12 2007, 11:05 AM) --Well, if they've been around for a long while, certainly upgrade notes is the wrong place to point these features out. But, I've been around for a long while too, (dozen years or so with LabVIEW, CLD) and both features are new (and useful) to me. I geuss that's why I aways follow the LAVA traffic, but it would be nice if the NI documentation did a better job of showing this sort of thing to us. (I'm sure both are in the documentation and I'll find details on the enum one now that I know to look, but why did it take LAVA to let me know to look?) Best Regards, Louis

QUOTE(Ben @ Aug 20 2007, 08:53 AM) BAAA!

Another vote against USB based serial ports--- Had an application with serial I/O to a motion controller which ran most of the time on a USB-serial port (can't recall the brand). It would mysteriously crash on timing errors every now and then. Previously same application had run pretty reliably on a NI PCMCIA serial card in my laptop. I had my client buy a new computer with built in serial port, and things were all light and happiness again. Far cheaper for them to buy a new computer than to pay me to beat my head on the wall over the old one-- Even taking the optimistic assumption I could have eventually got the USB-serial port to work. Louis

QUOTE(skof @ Aug 9 2007, 09:44 AM) But in that case, what is a minor defect? Best Regards, Louis

QUOTE(ASTDan @ Jul 31 2007, 02:24 PM) Fair summary of my opinion, but just my opinion. K_seeker seems to be in general agreement 'though. By the Way K_seeker: Welcome to LAVA! :beer: Louis

QUOTE(TG @ Jul 26 2007, 01:43 PM) My Kensington track ball (Expert mouse m/n 64325) has a big ring around the ball for the scroll wheel, works pretty naturally for me. My wrists seem best if I switch back & forth-- use the ball for a year, regular mouse for a few weeks, etc. Louis

Hi Dan: I think it depends on the details of what you are doing... For example, I have a couple of applications where I needed simple two and three axis stepper motor controls. I ended up using Stepnet controllers from Copley Controls, controlled through a serial port to one unit which passed commands to others. Each controller has all the limit switch, home switch, acceleration, torque & speed limit I needed for my fairly simple applications, and they were a little cheaper than the NI motor control board path (not only the cost of the control board, but also separate amplifiers, as I recall.) I did not need to control to a particular path. All I cared about was that I ended up where I wanted to be in x,y,z at each step in my process-- It didn't matter to me if I got to X before Y, or whether the path between one point and the next followed any specific curve. Beyond avoiding mechanical resonance, overload, or alternatively wasting a lot of time getting where I was going, I didn't much care about the details of accleration or maximum velocity either. If I'd cared about that sort of stuff, the NI board approach would have been more attractive--- I would have had to go to a more costly non-NI hardware solution, in which case the NI gear would have been cost-competitive for hardware. If the NI gear had been cost-competitive in a hardware sense, I would have chosen it to benefit from the (I suspect) more seamless integration with LabVIEW. Just my $0.02-- be interesting to hear what others think. Louis

Whew! A week prepping for a trade show too busy to LAVA, half a week at that show, and a week on vacation-- and the first thread I look at when I get back has added four pages since I was last on.... Hope all the others aren't this long, But then again even chosing the right name for [functional|LV2|whatever] globals never generated as much traffic as the fifth dimension. All in all, I expect the majority of the harm, if any, which Alfa generates falls on himself, so I don't see that the rest of us should worry-- we can, and I do, take the thread or leave it according to mood. Louis

I agree with much of what's already been said-- People should be treated gently & given the benefit of the doubt. For some people the best approach is to gently ignore them. But I would like to add-- and I may be repeating myself from a previous thread on the HH topic-- if there were some way we could encourage the teachers making the assignments to lurk on the site and keep an eye open for edvidence of plagarism in work submitted to them, the problem might be greatly mitigated. /rant The HH issue is more serious than its immediate burden. Some of these folks end up getting jobs as engineers based on their plagarism. They end up burdening us all on a long term basis because they lack of skill or motivation to carry their share of the weight. In the workplace, as well as in academia, this often goes unnoticed by supervisors who should be more attentive. /endrant Best Regards, Louis

Yes, same thing here in USA, always delivered by Fed Ex or some other really expensive means. Since my business is in a suburban residential area, the Fed Ex truck often makes a special trip. Another software vendor told me that they send a big box for a similar piece of paper, so that the recieving department of big companies are more likely to log it in and match it up with the purchase order so that the invoice could be paid. But that was years ago & by now accounting departments must have figured out that sometimes something as intangible as an email with an activation code in it can constitute the deliverable for a pretty big P.O. Ah well, its just a little CO2, no big deal...

Hi Skof: Welcome to LAVA, hope you enjoy it & find it as useful as I do :thumbup: . Best Regards, Louis

I use a product called Snagit to simply copy screen images into graphics files and then insert the graphics files into Word. Quite simple if all you want to do is copy the static image of a graph. Not quite free, but at $40.00 hardly what I'd call expensive, especially since it does a lot of other stuff than just copying static images to files & I think there's a free trial that you can use to decide for yourself. http://www.techsmith.com/ Best Regards, Louis

Hi Val: Thanks for the suggestion, that seems to have fixed the problem-- almost. I'm now having a somewhat similar problem: Runs fine on my machine in development environment. Runs fine on my machine as an .exe. Runs on other machines, either by copying an .exe to a machine with previously installed application using the control, or by running a full installer, and then manually copying the .ocx file from my machine to the target, then registering it on the target. Except for one problem-- The control is reduced in size by about 50% from the desired size, leaving a lot of blank screen. A lot of checking I should do, see if there is a later version of the file than that on my machine, check my build settings, etc... but since you were so quick with the suggestion that got me this far, I figured it was worth asking if you can suggest something off the top of your head for going the rest of the way, rather than beat my head against the wall. Again, great thanks for the help so far, :worship: , and Best Regards, Louis

Hi Val: Thanks for the quick response... I'll give it a try. Many thanks, Louis

Hi Folks: I'm having problems with a Active X CW 3D graph control. Its kind of embarrassing-- I suspect I've had and solved this problem before, but I can't for the life of me remember how. My Vi works fine in the development environment. As an .exe on the development environment machine, the program also runs fine. Copying the .exe to a computer which has another, previously installed application I've written using the 3D control also runs fine. But when I create an installer, and attempt to install the program on a new machine which has never had any LV applications installed on it previously, the VI does not work properly. I get the message: "Error loading Control. A newer vesion needed. The default settings for the control will be used." The control then does not appear on the front panel, although as far as I can tell the VI otherwiser runs properly. Right now I'm running version 7.1.1-- Since I had a bad time going to 8.0, I'm holding out till I'm through with this project on going up to 8.2.1 Much thanks in advance to whoever points out what is probably a pretty silly error on my part... Best Regards, Louis

I did some work with a general parser long ago-- I think I'd rather start from scratch than try and clean up the old code. But I do recall one aspect that worked pretty well... Rather than parsing the text string each and every run, I would "compile" object code from the text string on the rare occasions that the string changed. I substituted each string, such as "*" or "^" or "sin(" with a U8 in an array. These were used to select cases in a case structure. Getting rid of the text scanning made a HUGE improvement in execution speed. If I were doing it again, I'd use an enumerated type rather than a U8.

Hi George: Is there a great cost in not sending all the registers, even those the user hasn't changed, whenever the user wants to send even a single change? I know that this is a dumb & wasteful approach, but I almost always use it in similar situations. Unless you're talking to a sattelite out by Jupiter, the bandwidth you are wasting is pretty cheap. The cost of confusion in keeping track of what has changed and what hasn't, and insuring that all the changes, and none of the non-changes, make it out to the remote device can be a little pricey at the programming stage, and really pricey at the debug stage. Just my HO. Louis

Hi Ian: Welcome to LAVA! Hope you find it useful and enjoyable. Don't let us intimidate you-- while some folks here do pretty advanced stuff, many of us simply use LV as a good to to finish a task. Best Regards, Louis

Hi Gurkan: Welcome to LAVA! Hope you find it as useful as I do. Yeah, LV has changed quite a bit since 3.1. Best Regards, Louis

QUOTE(martin@aerodynamics @ Mar 8 2007, 03:08 PM) Somehow this seems very disturbing --like driving blindfolded. -Louis

Hi Steve: I think Albert may have been on the right path when he suggested local variables. Have the button switch and stay switched as long as you need it held that way (Latch when released action). After you complete the last action that needs the button switched, then write a false value to a local variable for the switch. (BTW, you can't make local variables for switches or buttons which have momentary action-- So set the mode to Latch when [pressed or released] before you try to make the local variable. Of course, might be an even better way-- best to avoid local variables unless really necessary-- if you can share your VI we might be able to suggest something more elegant. Best Regards, Louis.

SnagIt for screen captures. Louis