ShaunR

Thanks, crelf. Now NCIS is going to be after me.

What an unfortunate domain name you have Cat

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nads

Its not too hard to find and replace text. Passa Mak does it for controls, indicators and tip strips. It also has a diagram scanner to extract string constants. It wouldn't take much of an imagination to modify the the relevent bits for descriptions, revision history, decoration text etc. Although its not designed for regex replacements, it covers a lot of the bases you'd need or, at the very least, show you how to go about it.

To paraphrase yourself: "Where's the rep point?"

I didn't say it was good. Just that I agree

I'm with Gary on this one.

Another aspect is that not everyone "gets" OOP. There are many coders that use OOP capable languages that never write a bit of OOP in their entire career. Perhaps a better approach might be to start them on normal LV with the advantages of all the existing examples and training resources and filter out those that just don't have the head for it, rather than assume that everyone can and will learn.

Whoever gave you rep for this post deserves a beating. Everyone knows emoticons are only for those who lack telepathy, and, frankly, those kind of people don't belong on the Internets in the first place.

Another opening soon for Vaguely Interesting Engineering. CVs to Crelf

Dirty rotten swindler ... People like you are the reason we can't rely on the honor system!

Theres a system? I just randomly click click on posts because I like "green".

I'm pretty sure that asbo was kidding. Asbo: try using emoticons

I know he was But I was kind a hoping he would feel guilty and go back and click on a few posts

Think about it! There is no other way to make this feasible possible. The Embedded development system simply converts the VIs to C code and compiles that with the C tool chain for the target system. Just as there are 10 C coders a penny there is one impressive C compiler that works for almost all hardware, namely gcc. NI could spend 100ds of man years and try to write a LabVIEW compiler engine for every possible embedded hardware target out there and they would not get anywhere. By converting everything into C and let gcc (or whatever tool-chain a specific embedded target comes with) deal with it, they can limit the development to a scope that is manageable.

And of course the direct communication with hardware resources has to be dealt with in C somehow. There is simply no other way. The LabVIEW system can not possibly abstract the 10000 different hardware targets in such a way that you would not need to do that. On Windows you usually get away without since there are enormous driver suites such as DAQmx and many more that take care of the low level nitty gritty details like interrupts, registers, DMA, etc. On an embedded target that NI has at best had a board in their lab to work with this is not a feasible option.

If you need out of the box experience you should not look at embedded hardware. You are anyhow not likely to use the development kit board in an end product so the out of box experience stops there already.

A much better solution for out of box experience would be cRIO or maybe sRIO.

To me, its a bit like Codegear selling you Delphi and expecting you to do bits in Visual Basic.

People like LV because it is not C. What they could have done is run a linux kernel on the ARM and then use the linux RTE or ported their RTOS which currently supports intel and Power PC. There arn't that many platforms out there that they support so I think for that price they could have made a bit more of an effort.

Look for the property FrameNames of the CaseSel class. This is an array of strings much like the Strings[] property for enums.

OK. I've looked now

Its a little bit more complicated than that, since the frame names has to match the number of cases. If you just wire it to an array of strings, you will get an error and only 2 cases will have the names. You have to create the correct number of cases (array length - 2) using the "add frame" invoke node then wire your string array to it.

Its a Japanese advert

Why can I not take away reputation points?

Thats a bit rich since I post an example and get zero points. You convert them to 8.x and get three

If you use an enum (your example uses a ring) then when you right click on the case there is a menu option to "Add Case For Every Value".

I havn't looked, but there is probably a property or invoke node that enables you to do this in scripting.

Shaun,

Referring to this page, did the NI sales rep show you a Tier 1 or a Tier 2 evaluation board+device ? The Tier 1 devices apparently work "out of the box" - although that says nothing about UI configuration flexibility.

BTW even if what you say is true re. the inflexibility of the UI vis, unfortunately I suspect there will be nothing on the NI site that explicitly says so.

regards

Peter Badcock

Product Development

ResMed Ltd

Well. the board had a 2 line LCD display so it must have been tier 1. It did work "out of the box"....... with the demos. And as long as you changed only the data to the front panels it was fine. But when I said that our device was to have a 12 line matrix display and how could I mod the "display" vi to do that, he said I'd have to write my own display driver in C. He did demonstrate compiling, downloading and live debugging with a demo he had prepared. But when I started asking him to modify it, he changed some settings and then it would pop-up with a window full of c code and he would twiddle bits. I pushed him on it and asked why he wasn't changing the vis. Thats when I looked inside and found....well nothing, apart from the controls and indicators. The vis seemed to be purely placeholders for the generator.

thanxxxxxx alot guys

i will try to modify it

thanx

Ammar

Another tip. If you store the folders/files with the names in a "year-month-day" format (e.g 2008-10-02), then when you browse the folders they will be sorted chronologically. If you do it day-month-year they will be all over the place.

That's rather dissapointing Shaun. Was it an NI sales rep or some 3rd party rep ? Either way I hope they didn't know what they were on about. I naively assumed LabVIEW for ARM/Cortex would be more flexible than that.

Anybody else used LabVIEW with ARM or Cortex care to shed light on their negative or positive experiences ? Was anybody satisfied with their "Out of the box" experience ?

regards

Peter Badcock

Product Development

ResMed Ltd

It was an NI rep and the toolkit was "The Embedded Module for ARM Microcontrollers"

This is what it says in the sales blarb:

The Embedded Module for ARM Microcontrollers includes the LabVIEW C Code Generator, which generates C code from the LabVIEW block diagram.

Embedded Module For ARM

Including parentheses and semicolons

ShaunR, I think the rest of your post was well put too.

Where's my point then?

All posts we moved across to the new thread.

Except poor ol' Hooovahhs

I went to NI first. Too many choices.

The main difference between them is the speed. What devices are you intending to talk to?

who wrot ehti

NI evaluation kits with Hardware only have 'out of the box' solutions that work with an ARM7 or a Cortex-M3. I am interested in an NI "out of the box" solution supporting the ARM9 to minimise configuration time and increase my productivity.

I recently emailed 'Jamie Brettle' (Product Manager for LV Embedded S/W) who wrote this article. and asked him if NI has any plans to release something for the ARM9 and here was his response:

"Just to give some context in the choices of chips that we picked - given ARMs plans for the Cortex M line of processors, we anticipate that their performance will reach that of the ARM9 line while providing the benefits of the Cortex architecture (reduced power consumption, memory size). When this happens LabVIEW should be able to take advantage of this additional processing capabilities.

I'm not sure of a timeline for that (both from NI's and ARM's perspective) but in the interim we will keep an eye on the requests from our customers to provide an out of box ARM9 experience.

I will keep you up to date with any developments that happen."

So if you have written LabVIEW code for an ARM9, how did you find the experience and would you have preferred an "out of the box" solution if it existed ?

regards

Peter Badcock

Product Development

ResMed Ltd

I was interested in the ARM deveopment toolkit and asked the sales rep to come in, demo it and leave it with me for a couple of weeks. Long story short, I didn't bother with the demo kit and he left with it.

The toolkit I saw was basically a C generator. there were limited vis that enable you to do certain things, but you cannot modify them. If you look inside theres nothing in them. When I asked (for example) "this matrix display demo, how do I modify it ?" He said you generate the c code and modify the c code to whatever you want

It looked to me like a C template generator that you then go into and modify in the C environment of your choice. You might as well either write in in C in the first place or give it to a C coder since they are 10-a-penny. The sales guy couldn't really come up with a good reason for me to spend £3K on a toolkit when we've got ten C programmers on the payroll.

Our company has been getting an increasing number of orders for devices that use CAN bus. I have zero CAN bus experience so I'm shopping for a good (and preferably cheap) CAN interface/adapter that comes with handy-dandy LabVIEW drivers and/or examples to use for testing. Thanks in advance.

As its your first time, go with what you know!

http://www.ni.com/can/

The program reads voltage that is changing with time .. but from testing i have a table of pound force VS voltage .. SO how can i calculate the voltage input ( thats always changing with time ) and convert that value to pound force.

Use the express vi "Scaling and Mapping" in the "Signal Operation" palett and choose "interpolated". You can then define your table and use the vi to convert your readings fr any voltage.

I think I am hijacking this thread.

I think it was dead anyway

I am also confusing the issue. I am pretty sure that OOP of some form in LabVIEW is more attractive to an OOP programmer from another language than no OOP in LabVIEW, but I too am uncertain about using LVOOP with beginners. I am a very poor OOP programmer that is really enjoying learning. I think LVOOP is a tool that I can use to simplify coding for others. I will try the experiment.

Indeed. I believe LV OOP was invented to give C++ programmers a warm fuzzy feeling and entice them to use Labview.

The advantage for beginners that Labview brings is that they are able think in a sequential manner to start with and lay down code in the same order as their thought process when analysing problems. This means that they learn the environment a capabilities of LV quickly whilst still producing tangible results (i.e code that works) without being encumbered by how it works. Once they get used to using LV as a symbolic "scratchpad", they quickly move on to more complex subjects as a natural progression. They also don't have to worry about pointers, memory management and all the other obnoxious stuff that makes other languages so flexible so their time is spent on the problem rather than managing code.

However, if you sit them down and explain that you have to spend 3 weeks writing code with (from their point of view) no discernible benefit apart from being able to make other code work. They quickly get confused, frustrated and bored. If they can sit down and in 10 minutes turn a light on and off, or make the computer beep every time they walk past it.....then you have an audience

I think that LabVIEW objects can be used without adding the complexity you talk about. I also point out that non-OO programmers are usually very comfortable using C++ and .Net classes in LabVIEW. You don't have to know how to create a class to use a class.

But I am sure there is a topic about this elsewhere.

This is true. But when it doesn't give you what you were expecting, then you do!

Just because a program contains objects (C++ .net or anything) doesn't mean it is an object orientated program. Non OOP programmers view these objects as "functions" to extract whatever data they need. They (I? ) mainly view them as a container with specialised features not dissimilar to a vi with a case statement that enables selection of a series of sub vis. This view is far less abstract and easier to digest for virgin programmers.

.....I find it takes almost a year (10-20 hours /week) to get someoneprogramming by themselves in LabVIEW even if they are very good at Javaor another language.....

That's where your problem lies. I find it takes 1-2 months for a non-programmer that is eager to learn. You spend 6 months listening to text programmers whining about how they used to do it.

Oooooh.Managed to save something in 8.0

Opens and has a run arrow in 8.2.1; doesn't look like the warnings are an issue.

Your a sweety