ShaunR

QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 26 2009, 06:29 PM) As lame as my weekends eh? we may have converged on a spin-off topic. But you are still quite a way from convincing me that queues are "the magic bullet" and all applications should use this architecture. QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 26 2009, 06:29 PM) Same thing would work better with a notifier. No polling, no latency. Oooooh. No. Because then the UI would have to wait on the notifier(s). Also if you go down this path you end up with notifiers everywhere like a plague of mosquitos. A pain in proverbial to debug. All I have to do to debug is watch the global. There is no need for sequencing so a notifier is not useful. QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 26 2009, 06:29 PM) Still confused why you started this thread! Queues are elegant and extremely useful. That's what the fuss is about. Where I think we agree is that if the system is NOT asynchronous and doesn't need event handling, then larding it up with an event handler or a state machine is not good. I started this thread after a comment in another thread that suggested a fairly simple implementation would be better as a queue. I asked whats everyone fascination was with queues on this forum. As a newbie to this site, as I looked at more and more posts it seemed everyone was queue crazy and the remit was...lets start with a queue and make it all fit. So Rather than hijack the thread, I started a new one to find out why people thought (and I think even you said this too) queues are "the magic bullet" to application design. All applications have some degree of asynchronicity that doesn't mean you should design around a queue. It sounds almost as if you are agreeing with me in repesct to queues adding complexity QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 26 2009, 06:29 PM) Amen, brother. Dataflow is your friend. Easy to read, simple coding. But when you have parallel processes, dataflow doesn't apply. If they need to share data, you can use globals, which have lots of problems, or queues, which don't. The only problem with globals arises when you require synchronisation. But that isn't really a problem, it is (a very useful) feature of globals. The fact that it creates copies of data is a drawback (if you were running on a ZX spectrum...lol). But a queue isn't a replacement for globals as you point out in your example (removed the stop button from the user). And even in the first example it was used. QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 26 2009, 06:29 PM) Well my app has a networked sensor array with dozens of concurrent connections, with data going in both directions. Each TCP or serial connection is handled with a lightweight process (diagram almost fits on one screen), which is cloned and spawned as a dynamic call. Each of these identical handlers feed their bytes to a central queue for parsing, analysis, notification, and logging. The comm handlers register their own queues so the central code knows how to send individual responses and control messages. Sometimes the comms appear and disappear at random (some radios are crappier than others), but the LabVIEW handles it smoothly. In short, it works great, and queues make it all happen. The peg's looking kind of round from where I sit. I did say that distibuted IO (which is I think what you are describing) is one scenario that would warrant a queue. However, yours is a large app as I seem to remember (how much of that is event management and interprocess comms?) and certainly realising the BT client wasn't a large app because Delphi is event driven therefore very suited to the task. Horses for courses. QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 26 2009, 06:29 PM) I generally run these handlers with infinite timeout, so there is no timeout case (and no wait function). LabVIEW's internal execution scheduler may have to poll the queue somewhere deep in the bowels of LV, but that's not exposed to me. We have dozens of queues waiting in parallel with very low overhead and very low latency when an event is fired, so I suspect it's not polling at all, but is really sleeping. I don't know what you mean about a difference between queues and notifiers. As far as waiting and timing out, they act exactly the same. Queues do not have a wait function. Yes you can get similar behaviour IF you only ever have 1 message on the queue at asny one time, but if your producer(s) is faster than your consumer this is rarely the case. Therefore having an indefinite timeout makes no difference as your sub process still needs to inspoect the message to see if it was meant for it. So it is not sleeping, it is inspecting. You would then need a case for if the message wasn't for it and you can't just let it run through a tight loop so a wait so many milliseconds would be needed. So it's not sleeping evertime there is a message on the queue regardless of who it is for. QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 26 2009, 06:29 PM) OK that's why I'm still on this thread. I rewrote your version using queues. No globals, no polling (except to simulate acquisition), no latency, asynchronous (event-driven), no possibility of race conditions or data loss, and no crowbar needed -- all thanks to queues. Queues of data, not of messages. And yes, it runs as fast or as slow as you ask it to run. There is a little bit of jitter at 1 or 2 ms, but I think that is caused by using the Timeout case of the event structure, not by the queues and notifiers. http://lavag.org/old_files/post-1764-1240766707.zip'>Download File:post-1764-1240766707.zip Ummm. It doesn't do what it says on the tin. It uses no globals, because you have removed the "Stop" from the user in SubVI1. The original example uses a global also. In the example I posted (ver 2), I set the aquisition time to 0ms and could acheive 3 ms of aquisition (mainly due to the 1ms delay I have in my notifier VI). All of the VI's show 3ms and all the vi's show the same loop iteration thus proving they are all capturing the aquisition "Event" with no loss.(well. The aquisition VI might show one more since it gets an extra go after you press stop on the aquisition vi). In yours, however. If I set it to 0ms the aquisition vi runs like the clappers (6229 for the length that I ran it) but the others show significantly less (2654). What is happening to the other 2654 samples of data?

QUOTE (Aristos Queue @ Apr 26 2009, 08:50 PM) Shorter ones first...lol. Even if there IS data in the queue but not for that "thread"? And (just a point to fill my knowledge gap) Are you saying that 2 while loops (or 50 even) will run in their own separate threads?

QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 25 2009, 08:12 PM) What I actually meant was why do you use notifiers to receive updates when you are using a queue anyway for events. I've just read it back and see that I phrased it badly (the subject before being events) it was in response to the previous paragraph which finished with QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 25 2009, 08:12 PM) they use queues to communicate with the various processes they need to effect. Often the receive status updates via notifier. I tend (generally) to use one or the other as in many cases as (you point out later) their features can be seen to be synonymous. QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 25 2009, 08:12 PM) I guess a better question is how do you handle asynchronous activity in your programs? Do you poll for every possible status change on every component, or do you set up event handlers? I use an appropriate strategy. Not really answering your question though, I know, but I'm not sure of what you have in mind. I tend to think through the partitioning and use encapsulation to distill interaction between sub components to a bare minimum and make each aynchronous task as autonomous as possible. Generally it boils down to an error indication, start, stop and pause. But I will give you a very typical example of an every day scenario that would be very complicated using events/queues/notifiers etc. But Labview makes very easy and can be done it minutes. Lets assume the system is monolithic and only runs on one machine (a test/inspection machine for example) and say I have 32 digital inputs that indicate alarm conditions on of which only 8 of them are to be displayed on the user interface. I can (and do) arrange with the electrical guys that those 8 are all on the same port (I give them a spreadsheet with the pin numbers of the DIO device and define which sensors/outputs will be attached to what).Now I can have an asynchronously running digital input VI that all it has to do all day is read the status of those digital inputs and write them to a global as a 32bit number. Then I can easily mask them off in the user interface just by polling that global and (with the number to boolean function) show the user which ones they are in a 1D array of booleans or I can use the number as an index into an array of strings to show an error string. If you have multiple banks (like 128 in banks of 8) you can partition those banks for each hardware subsystem). Then your on-screen alarms become a 2D array of booleans, each row (or column) associated with each piece of hardware. Any other VI can also read that global if and when it wants to (none of that critcal section rubbish with Labview ). So if some other part of the system needs to now about it it can. Quick, simple and as I said takes a few minutes. Now. This test machine needs to feed a part from a bowl feeder into the test/inspection section. Again. I create a "Bowl Feeder" vi that requires a Start (give me a part), Stop (shutdown), Pause (wait a mo 'cos somethings wrong) and error (or no error if everything is ok). I don't need a response that a part has arrived because that will be given by a sensor. So I eventually end up with all these autonomous, asynchronous subsystems (each only requiring a start, stop, and pause). The start is usually from the main sequencing engine (single notifier if everything happens in parallel or one for each if they are staggered). The stop and pause can be a global (similar to that used in my previous posted example) and the subsystem handles its own errors and pauses all the other subs and the sequence engine while it figures out what to do about it and invokes the shut down procedure if it can't do anything. Now. Distributed IO is a different kettle of fish! QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 25 2009, 08:12 PM) Well I found it difficult to manage an event-driven user interface in the same loop as several acquisition/control processes. If some of those processes had to maintain an internal state, it got even harder. If I wanted to reuse those hardware items in other applications, it was often easier to just rewrite the code. With a queue handling the inputs for a given device, I can have a modular program for that device which maintains any necessary state and accepts asynchronous event messages. I have always had the UI in its own loop. I used to "break" the link with globals and dynamic loading (the example I posted would have used globals instead of notifiers and would have been quite messy), now we have other tools like events, notifiers, queues, semaphores and the like. We have the tools to make more elegant solutions. QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 25 2009, 08:12 PM) I have to admit it I got the impression that you rarely use them, and that you don't use all the features of them (that I and others have mentioned in previous posts). You'll have to forgive me, but I just don't see how anyone could use them regularly and then ask why others find them indispensable. I do rarely use them (in the way that they are often used). Not because I don't like them, but because they don't warrant the use in a lot of the systems I design (take the example above). I could use them, but a couple of notifiers and a small global do the job without having to define messaging scheme for interaction. If it were a distributed system or a supervisory system where a lot of information is being exchanged, then yes it would warrant it, but not just for a start, stop and pause. I'm an advocate of the choosing the right architecture for the specification rather than just throw a queue at it, which it strikes me a lot of people seem to be. QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 25 2009, 08:12 PM) I am certainly open to other opinions. What architecture do you use for your majority of large applications where queues were not the best solution? Do you handle user input and environmental input (alarms, triggers, other state changes) in the same loop of execution? Do you pass messages between with some other mechanism? Do you run a monster event loop, and run everything in the timeout case, and make sure that every subvi can finish in 50ms or so? I would love to hear more about other architectures you prefer. See above QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 25 2009, 08:12 PM) Sounds plenty big. Do state changes on one hardware device have asyncrhonous effects (triggers) on other devices? How do you handle that? If the user presses the STOP ALL/RESET/CANCEL button(s), how is that handled? In the above example and in the case of an alarm dialogue. It would set the pause flag while it is on-screen (if that's whats required or it might just log it to a file...depends). Crowbar all the subsystems and invoke the "graceful shutdown.vi" on a reset or stop. And un-set the pause flag for a cancel. . Triggers would probably be hardware and catered for by the the individual subsystem responsible for it. QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 25 2009, 08:12 PM) My current project has about 4000 VIs, and probably 2500 are running at in the main app, with about 25 parallel static loops and 2 to 100 or more dynamically spawned loops, all of them containing at least one queue or notifier for message passing and synchronization. When this system grew to about 1500 VIs, we couldn't maintain the code any more until we refactored everything and used a lot more queues. I think that a much smaller app of only a few dozen VIs could still benefit from using queues if there are mulitple asynchronous tasks. That depends on how much info they need to do their job. I prefer autonomous encapsulation of the task as it makes the code a lot more understandable and intuitive (and less documentation ) QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 25 2009, 08:12 PM) A queue-driven event handler is exactly the same, though if your handler is not fast enough, queue messages will stack up. In many of my loops this is not a big deal. In an interrupt I think the call frames nest on a stack in the same situation, and whether or not this can be tolerated is a design decision. I don't see this as much different, and certainly the dataflow nature of labview makes it harder to intervene in executing code at an arbitrary point. That limitation affects any kind of LabVIEW code. I think I see the where the difference in views lie. I don't see dataflow as a limitation. The fact that it is a a dataflow paradigm, means that you don't have to worry about state information. The function (or vi) gets executed when all its inputs have data. Its implicit. In event driven languages (I also program in Delphi and C++ by the way) you have to have a lot of state information to make the application work in an ordered fashion. This is unnecessary in Labview which is why it is fantastic for test/automation/inspection etc but sucks as a webserver (although NI would like to think its great). I recently wrote a bit-torrent application (lots of concurrent connections appearing and disappearing at random, asynchronous pipes etc). Wrote that in Delphi because it would be a nightmare in Labview. Square pegs don't fit in round holes. QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 25 2009, 08:12 PM) Well I have a couple comments here. For one, I'm not a huge fan of over-using state machines. I always prefer dataflow. If I have to do four operations, I'd rather see four subvis in a row than four cases in a state machine loop. But other people really like them. The large app I mentioned above has very few state machines. Ditto. They hide functionality, can be difficult to conceptualise and break dataflow. That said. They do have the advantage that they compact code and enable selective branching. If used spareingly a definite asset. But often abused. I think were on the same page there QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 25 2009, 08:12 PM) The second comment is that the example is just an illustration. When programming books talk about recursion, they almost always show the factorial operation. But no one ever uses a recursive program to calculate a factorial. It's just a common example because it's easy to get one's head around. So for you take this example to task is like saying recursion is useless because you could just calculate factorials with a for loop and a shift register (which is the right way to do it). First off. I don't consider the former to be the "wrong way" just "another" way. There are many tools at our disposal and we should choose those that are appropriate. As I think I said in the notes. It was to demonstrate that the use of queues adds complexity and obfusification. It took me about an hour to write that, debug, benchmark and comment it (with coffees). I expect the same cannot be said for the original (excluding the pictures and write-up I mean). It may have been an illustration. But there are many out there that would do just such an app that way. QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 25 2009, 08:12 PM) Your example is a better solution to that problem, but we already established that the author wasn't trying to solve a problem so much as illustrate a scalable architecture. Better? No. They both fulfill the spec. I think one is easier to read and understand because it uses Labviews dataflow more and the other is more complex and difficult to read because it breaks that dataflow and adds complexity to compensate. QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 25 2009, 08:12 PM) Your rework still uses a notifier which isn't any different (to me) than a queue. Sometimes you want multiple listeners (notifiers) and sometimes you want to guarantee messages won't be skipped if you fall behind (queue). When you don't care about either, then they are equivalent. If your entire thesis is that queues are not as useful as notifiers, then I think you're being silly. No. My thesis is that queues add complexity, are cryptic and (sometimes) require more VI's to be modified throughout the code. And that should be taken into account when designing a system since other alternatives can yield a more intuitive and easier to read solution and have better encapsulation. QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 25 2009, 08:12 PM) I made a VI, which isn't too much different than other stuff you've seen but I'll post it anyway. It's an architecture that is working well for me. I would still love to see more about what is working for you in your large applications. Many thanks. One observation. It doesn't "go to sleep" it polls the status until it has something in the queue. So I'm guessing you have a wait so many milliseconds in the timeout case. That is the big difference between queues and notifiers. If you add another notifier (wait) to my example before the acquisition another after the AQ notify in the Subvi 2 (notify) and a third before the while loop in the main (also a notify just to kick off the aquisition in the first place) then you can run the system fully synchronised, flat out with no loss of data (3ms). You can't do that with a queue. See attached: Download File:post-15232-1240703966.zip And if you read all that your a star....lol.

I was perusing the internet this afternoon and came accross this: Queued Statemachines It seemed a very complicated solution just to acquire and display a graph. And an excellent example of why you should not use Queues for everything. They obfuscate and complicate. So (for a bit of fun - I'm sad like that) I decided to rewrite it NOT using queues but instead using more traditional methods. In fact, I thought I'd demonstrate notifiers at the same time. It can be improved but the purpose was to replicate the queue example and I didn't want too spend more than an hour of my life doing it. The result I'll let you judge for yourself. However it is a fraction of the size, fewer VI's, less complicated and extremely easy to understand unlike the queue example. The example from the above website. Download File:post-15232-1240670379.zip Alternative. Download File:post-15232-1240670495.zip

QUOTE (shoneill @ Apr 24 2009, 08:26 AM) Succinctly put! That is why queues are not events. You can even have multiple event structures linked to a single event (that's how I get round the local variable on Latch booleans). What (IMHO) would be a good enhancement to events is..... if you could define an event (say by right clicking on a control or indicator), plonk an event structure anywhere in your code (not just the same VI) and it appears in the list of events to link to. Then you could do things like when a DAQ digital line toggles and sets an indicator on your low level acquisition vi, an indicator on the screen toggles or an alarm dialogue appears or even kick off entire processes. It would make notifiers and occurrences obsolete and make rendezvous and semaphores actually useful. I would save weeks coding. We would also have an event scheme to rival any of the other event driven languages with the added bonus that we can also use dataflow.

I'd like to be able to use "<" (less than) or ">" (greater than).

QUOTE (Roger Munford @ Apr 22 2009, 10:18 PM) Hmmmm. Not sure what your asking here. First of all, a fixed point number is an integer that is scaled by a factor (12.3 can be expressed as the integer 123 scaled by 1/10). If your raw data is only 2 bytes then your calibration data need only be 2 bytes IF you won't exceed the 2 bytes by adding it (65536). If by adding the calibration you exceed this you will require more (1 more byte will give you a ceiling of 16777216) . However, you only need to store 1 calibration number per measurement interface so if you have 8 analogue inputs, you only need 16 bytes to store the cal data for all inputs. Your results data will still be 2 or 3 bytes per measurement. This is where I'm confused. You say that if you "store the calibrated data", you have 4 bytes per measurement. But the raw data is 16 bytes. So it could be that your cal data is 4 bytes and you are doing 4byte (32 bit) arithmetic or your cal data is 2 bytes but you are doing 4 byte arithmetic. Alternatively are you saving the scale and offset for each result? In which case there is no need to. You can just store 1 cal and offset for each channel (2 bytes per channel so for an 8 ch analogue input that would be 16 bytes) and your results would still be 2 bytes (with the caveat outlined earlier). Another scenario is that you are actually converting to a Single Precision number (4 bytes) which is a waste of time as your data is 16 bits.

QUOTE (normandinf @ Apr 24 2009, 04:06 AM) That is incredible. They don't show the first (worst) bit though....the ironing.

QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 23 2009, 03:42 PM) Giving up already I believe the Event Structure to be the best innovation in labview since.....well...I can't remember when. Why don't they receive by a queue? QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 23 2009, 03:42 PM) Occasionally I am asked to do maintenance from very old programs before I started to use queues (some of them pre-date the introduction of queues), and not only do they work less naturally from the end user perspective, but it is a pain to maintain the code since everything is in one big hairy loop or else there are lots of crazy locals and globals causing race conditions. In addition those apps are not as big, because those problems get exponentially worse as the program size grows, so there is kind of a limit to how big the app can get before it is too much work. I don't see why they should work less naturally just because they don't use queues. QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 23 2009, 03:42 PM) Every time I experience this, I think, "Wow, queues are really the magic bullet to program design that makes large application development feasible in LabVIEW". I'm sure there could be other ways to develop large applications, but queues are very flexible and robust, and have a terrific API (unlike the horrible File I/O library), and have great performance. Obviously you have a different opinion, but I encourage you to try a big application with queues, and I think you won't go back. It's always been feasible (and fairly straight forward). You seem to be under the impression I've never used queues. I have written several queue based applications where that technique was the most appropriate (2 of them with a team of 8 Labview programmers). But I have written far more where it was not. So I guess I have gone back, and forward, and back......etc. I'm not sure of your criteria for "big" but I tend to gauge the scale of a project on how much hardware I have to interface too since that is probably 75% of the programming time on most most of my applications. The current one involves 12 motors, 8 marposs probes, 5 camera's, 192 digital IO's, 2 analogue inputs, 12 analogue outputs and 3 proprietary devices using MVB , CAN and RS485. This part of the project I would consider medium sized since it is one of 3 machines (which are similar but not identical) and will be part of an automated production line.

QUOTE (neBulus @ Apr 22 2009, 09:47 PM) And means that you can convert n-dimensional arrays

Wire an indicator to the Standard out and you will see the result from your call to the DOS box. You don't get an error because the SystemExec successfully completed the CMD call. However, the DOS box may not have executed the copy command. If you look in the windows help, they suggest making a batch file with the command options and calling that. I personally would use a "Call Function Block Node" to call a windows API to achieve what you are trying to do. (Kernel32.dll has a SetFileTime function). Although there may be an easier/more elegant method.

QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 21 2009, 09:23 PM) Your talking about not interrupting an interrupt on a microcontroller with one interrupt level. An interrupt, (generally-as it's name suggests) "interrupts" program execution. If your main program is running and an interrupt comes in, on a microcontroller, it will automagically switch to the interrupt vector where your handler sits after pushing the program counter and other state information onto the stack. Once the interrupt has been serviced, it will pop the stack and resume program execution. But. If you remember I said I view events in a similar way to interrupts (analogous, not that they were), and qualified that by saying that they can happen in any order and at any time. which is is true. An interrupt can be from any of a number of sources (character comes in on the USART, watchdog timer, A/D conversion etc) which, when this "event" occurs will immediately pause the main program execution and jump to the handler(s). And one of those "events" may be every 20ms and another may be when there is a "T" in the day and the girlfriend has gone to see her mother. QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 21 2009, 09:23 PM) With any event driven system, the maximum amount of time an event takes to be handled determines the latency of the system to handle new events. It would be nearly pointless to use any event-driven system to handle a 10-minute monolithic process. If you need to handle other events, you can usually break up a long process into many successive events, and throw the follow-on events from inside the handler. That's a state machine, which is another great use for a queue. Are fou saying that VB, C++ or Delphi couldn't handle a file search? (of course your not ) A file search can take more than 10 mins and when it finds a file matching the search criteria, raises an event (usually with passing a search record). The main program is just sitting there (animating an icon, refreshing the display, picking its nose) untill the event tells it its found something. I'll start another thread about Labview, state machines and why windows programmers love them....lol. QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 21 2009, 09:23 PM) If you look at real-time OS design, it is basically the same problem. Every operation of the processor has to be divided into time slices, and between each one, the system has to check whether other higher-priority tasks are pending. You could easily implement this with LV queues, since you can flush the queue, and then evaluate whether the pending items should be reordered, and stuff them back into the front of the queue. How granular each event needs to be is just a design decision, and it's the same decision in an RTOS or a LV Queue-driven event handler. If you need a high-priority system, like an emergency stop, that can interfere with the code inside any event handler, you should have a separate queue for that (in addition to whatever hardware interlocks you need). But I've just been convinced that Labview is parallel in nature ). Surely we just parallel up our slices until its big enough for our complete task QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 21 2009, 09:23 PM) No, the major difference is that queues are FIFO, and notifiers are broadcast events with no history. If your notifier handler is not fast enough, you will lose events rather than stacking them up and falling behind like a queue would. Indeed (well 50% indeed anyway). Queues are a particular type of buffer where only the first and last elements are accessible (FIFO,FILO). If your consumer is slower than your producer (as in my example), your buffer (queue) will just increase until you reach a limit (resources or you've fixed the length of the queue). However, with notifiers, if your consumer is slower than your producer your producer can just sit idle until it receives some indication (another notifier perhaps) that the sub process has finished. A queue based system demands that things are taken off the queue faster than they are put on the queue. Notifiers do not have this limitation (but they do have limitations). The consumer is idle until a start "event" has occurred and the producer is "idle" until the "process complete" event has occurred. I'm not anti-queues. I just don't think they are the magic bullet to program design which some people (not necessarily on this forum) seem to think they are. QUOTE (jdunham @ Apr 21 2009, 09:23 PM) So, I'm tired of typing now. What more is it going to take, besides the ardent fan base of dozens or hundreds of users on this board, to convince you that queues are actually pretty darn useful? I've still got Marks post to do QUOTE (Mark Yedinak @ Apr 22 2009, 06:40 PM) I still fail to see how you can say that a queued message is not generating an event. A message can be queued from anywhere at any time just like your interrupts. The event handler (the part of the code taking messages from the queue) processes them as soon as the arrive just like an interrupt handler. Also, an interrupt handler will only be working on a single event at a time just like a queue. /quote] A queue doesn't generate events, neither does it react to events WHEN they happen (which is what is meant by event driven). I would consider an OnQueue or OnDeQueue to be an event that would be "generated" by a queue (which doesn't exist in Labview). Your queue implementation is a history (or buffer) of "events" that have occurred at some point in the past and the order in which they occurred (user clicks something on screen, DAQ, VISA or whatever). It is an extension to the logging example in the examples directory. It will only process these historic events if it is at the front of the queue therefore it will only process it immediately if there is only 1 in the queue (queue of one sounds familiar ) The old Motorola 68000 family processors had 7 interrupt levels which denoted priority levels. In LabVIEW if you created 7 queues and had 7 parallel message handlers (one for each queue) your system would not behave any differently than a 68000 processor. What you do and how events are processed is up to the "interrupt" handler. You had to write the specifics of your ISR for the 68K too. In addition, since the 68K was single threaded higher priority interrupts caused the code in the lower priority ISRs to stop running. Only one thing could be running at one time on that processor. For multithreaded, multicore systems you still need to figure out a way for one task to stop another. This would is true regardless of whether you are using LV or not. Multiple priorities don't really solve this problem when you have multiple parallel tasks running since each task is independent. In addition if you are using a single queue for events you can always queue a high priority task at the front of the queue. This way that event will be processed next. Whew. What a lot of effort to mimic a 20 year old single threaded processor . This example, however, is a good example of interrupts interrupting interrupts. The key point here though is that WHEN the interrupt occurs "code in the lower priority ISRs to stop running"! Not "the interrupt will be serviced IF the request is at the front of the queue". QUOTE (Mark Yedinak @ Apr 22 2009, 06:40 PM) With respect to concurrent or parallel I think you are being a bit picky about the terms. Of course if you have a single CPU nothing every trully runs in parallel. However with multicore CPUs no LabVIEW does utiltize all of the cores. You don't even have to change your code for this to happen. I am not sure how old versions of LV would handle this but certainly the newer versions are aware of multiple cores. This is not true in the text based languages. You have to jump through quite a few hoops to take advantage of multiple cores with a single application. I think Greg answered this better than I.

QUOTE (Mark Yedinak @ Apr 21 2009, 12:45 AM) Done. QUOTE (Mark Yedinak @ Apr 21 2009, 12:45 AM) Creating parallel tasks in C or C++ is not a trivial task. You have to manually create your processes and threads. In LabVIEW this is all done for you. Drop two loops next to each other and you have parallel code. It is as simple as that. I will concede Labview "parallelism" but I I think we are talking about concurrency and I would wholeheartedly agree that labview runs concurrent tasks but not parallel code. But it's not an area I'm an expert in and perhaps I'm being too pedantic (I don't really care how it works as long as it does...lol). You are right though multithreading in C++ is not trivial. It is in Delphi though QUOTE (Mark Yedinak @ Apr 21 2009, 12:45 AM) No, queues are event driven. While waiting on a queue (or a notifier) your code does nothing. It is waiting for an event to trigger indicating that either an element has been queued or you have a timeout. Event driven means that your code is doing nothing until some event occurs. The code will effectively be using zero CPU cycles. (LabVIEW's scheduler will consume a few CPU cycles but the higher level code in your application will do nothing.) Notifiers are nothing more than a queue of size one. A notifier can only have one element "queued" at a time. Queues simply allow more elements to be placed on the stack. Event structures and VISA events are just different event types. Regardless, when using queues or notifiers you are writing event driven code. As for your disembodied code I suggest you try http://Network-Queue-t11048.html&p=46805' rel='nofollow' target="_blank">network based queues. Since you already use notifiers it shouldn't be too difficult for you to use queues. I see events rather differently. Events (to me) are analogous to interrupts. Events can occur in any order and at any time and, on invocation, handler code is executed. A queue in Labview, however, does not generate events rather (from what you have described) you are taking the presence of data to mean that an event has occurred. You don't know what event has occurred until you have popped the element and decoded it The order is fixed (the position in the queue) and presumably, while this is happening, no other "events" can be processed so they cannot occur at any time (well perhaps they can occur at any time, but not be acted upon). The major difference between notifiers and queues is that notifiers can occur in any order and at any time and the "handler" (the section of code waiting) will be invoked. I would be interested to see how you handle priorities with a queue. Lets say (for example) Event 1 must always be executed straight away (user presses Emergency Stop) but event 2 can wait (acquisition data available. And just to be annoying, lets say processing the acquisition data takes 10 minutes and you've got 100 of them in the queue when the e-stop comes in ;P ). In an event driven environment, when Event 1 comes in its handler can check if the Event 2 is running and stop/pause it or postpone it (cut power and gracefully shut down acquisition).

Not wisihing to hijack this thread (perhapse start a new one? This could go on a while...lol)....but! QUOTE (Mark Yedinak @ Apr 20 2009, 11:20 PM) Well. It was a while ago (I weened on version 2.0...it came on floppies...lol). But I seem to remember creating monolithic executables. Deployment was a doddle QUOTE Since LabVIEW is inherently parallel in nature you always need some mechanism to pass data between parallel tasks and to synchronize them as well. Queues naturally do this. Unlike a global variable queues provide synchronization as well. In addition they are event drvien so you can avoid polling local or LV2 style globals. They are also very efficient with respect to performance. Actually Labview is inherently serial in nature (left to right). That is why you have to resort to other techniques to manage parallelism. I also fail to see how they are event driven given that you put something in the queue and take things out...nothing more. It is a serial buffer with access to only the first and/or last entry in the buffer. I don't tend to use queues much, but I do extensively use notifiers for passing data and synchronising, which aren't really event driven either in so much you can wait for a notifier and it will get triggered. The only truely event driven features in Labview are the Event Structure and VISA Event. But linking events programmatically accross disembodied vi's (which I use far too often); I've always found troublesome.

Am I right in thinking you would still have to have all the "NI stuff" anyway? (i.e the run-time engine). Oh for the days of standalone executables ! And what is this obsession with queues on this site?

QUOTE (crelf @ Apr 20 2009, 06:06 PM) Ditto.

QUOTE Sure there is. Current Loop

Hi Peeps. I thought I'd put this out into the wild before completion because I'm not going to get around to it again for another few months and as I've not seen anything else around; thought it might be useful. It's a partial implementation of the OBEX protocol with an example of the OBEX Object Push Profile over bluetooth for sending files to mobile devices (vards,vcalendars, images,music etc). Load up the BT Push File.vi (top directory) and set the address and you should be good to go to send files to your mobile phone. The example has been tested on both the Microsoft and Widcomm stack to send files to samsung (U600, i8510) and nokia (N95,N81) phones without any problems, but (as with any new software) I am expecting a few teething problems so let me know and (no promises) I'll see what I can do. If you are using the Widcomm stack. I would suggest pairing first because Widomm requires authentication and the authentication manager takes quite a while to pair so you will time out. The Microsoft stack doesn't require authentication first so need to pair at all. Download File:post-15232-1240155321.zip

OK. I understand. I would be very tempted to just make your display a 2D array of strings (first column can be a label if you want). Then regardless of what data it is you can just format it in whatever manner you think is fit and append it. If it doesn't exist it will just appear as a blank (or you can insert N/A or whatever). If you hide the fact that it is an array, it will just look like a multi-line label. If you add more fields later, just make more elements visible. if you redefine fields , just change the labels (if you have any). The question I haven't asked properly is this. Is your problem just a method to display the info, or is it some intermediate stage that the data in your fields will be processed later?

QUOTE (Val Brown @ Apr 17 2009, 04:44 PM) Because our IT is analy retentive.If I connect it to "THEIR" network then they have to have ownership which means the following: 1. Cannot take the lid off to install cards. Have to send a support request to get the card installed which may be in 2-3 days time if I'm lucky. If found "tamperig with company property"....written warning 2. No administrator priveleges. If software needs to be installed...Yup..you guessed it..Support ticket...2-3 days. 3. Must have a defacto desktop/laptop PC with all the their crap and must use XP even if the customer wants Vista. 4. The licence would have to be in one of their names (as you know...NI only supply support to the name on the license) so they can provide me with support <img> which means that yet again I would have to send a support ticket to get them to phone NI to asks a question which they know didly squat about. I will just point out though that I do have number 3 also. They decided that a dual core (not even core2) 1.6 GHz Toshba laptop with 512MB ram and a 20 Gig hard-drive is an adequate Labview development platform. It takes 20 minutes to boot in the morning if connected to the network because of their policies. Because of that, I run Labview, labwindows, test stand and all the toolkits on an industrial PC on it's own network where I can do what needs to be done. When it needs to be done. We actually rate our IT department as a project risk. The less involvement...the better. So. It is a real pain but the alternative is worse!

Chatty embedded engineers? That's an oxymoron isn't it?

Diogenes of Sinope. Because we are all a bunch of cynics and perceived as criminals by text programmers.

Everyone will have their own methods and solutions to this one. It's an old problem with many equally correct solutions. If you give an example stream and header structure we would probably be able to justify each approach better and you could pick the solution that best fits your preferences. I find, generally, the best option, if possible, is to find the super set of the protocols and choose a display method that can cope with all of them. what do I mean by this...Well... Lets say your devices both send a header consisting of a command byte, a length byte and the payload (nice and simple). In device 1 the length byte is 2bytes long but in device 2 it is 4 bytes long. The length byte of both devices can be represented as a 32 bit number so you would choose that to display the length. Just in case the hardware engineers decide to use a bigger length in the future you could even go for 64 bit integer. Now. slightly different (but following the same approach). Lets say we want to represent the command byte with human readable strings. We could use a menu ring (since arbitrary and non consecutive values can be assigned to its strings). We could then assign each string with the value directly from the command byte - job done for device 1. Now there are two ways of coping with device 2 depending on how much similarity there is. 1. If most of command bytes are exactly the same and the extra ones are just extensions to the original protocol (device 1, MkII) then we have already done most of the work and we only need to add the extra values to the menu ring. 2. If the command byte of device 2 use the same values as device 1 but mean completely different things (usually different devices) then add...say 100 to the command byte and assign the menu ring strings for that device command byte +100. So. 2 devices, 2 different headers and we display a menu ring and a U64. If they add more commands...we just add to our menu ring. If they change the number of bytes (up to 8 anyway), we don't need to change anything. You can extend this for the payload too (up to a point )

QUOTE (neBulus @ Apr 17 2009, 02:15 PM) That's a sour remark...lol