SteveChandler

I don't think anyone has to worry about Prius batteries. Toyota will pay a pretty big bounty for them dead or alive (or so I hear) I know that I have a 100,000 mile/10 year warranty on the battery. Even if I didn't I think the cost for a battery is about $3,700 - about the same as a major transmission repair. The Prius doesn't have a conventional transmission. It is a continuously variable transmission so no shifting. It was kind of weird to get used to.

I took advantage of an excellent deal from a family member who is a Toyota sales manager. I was about $7K upside down on the Mustang and traded it in for the Prius. I drove away owing about $3K over the dealers cost on a 0% loan and no down payment. After paying off the Mustang they broke even. Now I owe less than I could sell the car for after only about a year. That is not too common after trading in a car with that much negative equity for a new one. They had too many Prius' on the lot at the time so I got a deal that I could not say no to.

If I wanted the cheapest total cost per mile I would probably look at a Diesel Jetta. Unfortunately I don't know any sales managers at VW.

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I regularly go at least 5 or 10 miles above the speed limit whenever traffic allows it. There are a few things that annoy me but the big one is when you have someone in each lane side by side going 32 in a 45 with nobody in front of them. It is almost as if they are in some sort of conspiracy. As soon as one finally gets out of the way the other speeds up. Grr!

I usually default to the right lane. It just depends on the situation. If I am on the freeway and I know there is a busy onramp ahead I tend to get in the left lane so people can merge in. Sometimes the people that I moved over for so they could merge onto the freeway wave at me but with only one finger. No not their thumb either.

I drive a Prius. The first thing I noticed after buying it is that people hate Prii (I think that's the plural). Before this car I had a Mustang GT and I drive the Prius the same way as I drove that. Right lane or left lane people just want to get in front of me and do so. It doesn't matter that there is 1.3 car lengths between me and the car ahead and absolutely nobody behind me. It doesn't matter that I have to slam on my breaks and/or swerve so that they don't hit me. The difference in attitude I get from other drivers since I traded in the Mustang for a Prius is absolutely stunning. We have all seen a Prius going 54 in the left lane. But I have seen this from Corvettes with 450HP under the hood. There are lots of hybrids on the road these days but for some reason none are hated like the Prius.

I think I drive a lot like Ben but maybe a little faster. I try to avoid accelerating or breaking as much as possible and I use my cruise control more often than not. It is the difference between 41 MPG and 53 MPG. If someone wants to get in front of me I let them. Especially if they are speeding since they are probably the one who the highway patrol will be busy with by the time I get there.

I love the Prius. Before I drove one I had this impression that they were cramped inside and gutless. Not true at all. I brought home a big flat screen TV from Costco in it so it definitely has room. And the car is no race car but it is not the slowest thing I have driven either. I bought the car in Bellevue Washington and live in Portland Oregon. On the way home (250 miles or so) there is a long section of freeway where the speed limit is 70. There were a bunch of cars in the left lane but the right lane was open so I passed them all in the right lane. Traffic was going more than 70 and so I knew that I was going significantly over the speed limit. But I was not really used to this car yet and when I looked down at the speedometer I was surprised to see that it said 101. I don't think I ever had the Mustang over 90. Not that it couldn't do it.

One time I was driving the Prius in the left lane with my cruise control set at exactly the speed limit. There was nobody in front of me and a long line of cars all bunched up behind me. In the right lane very slightly ahead of me was a big semi also going the speed limit. What the cars behind me and the semi could not see was the state patrol car in front of him. In the right lane next to me and behind the semi was a VERY irate middle aged woman in an F250. They are the worst. Her fists were in the air because she wanted me to let her in. Blinkers would have worked but I slowed down slightly to let her in anyway. She punched it and nearly cut me off. As she was "waving" at me she flew in front of the trooper. As soon as she saw him she slammed on her breaks as if she saw a child in the road. I had to do the same thing and so did the line of cars tailgating me.

The blue lights came on and we all passed her and the state trooper.

Agreed. Other than Homer Simpson I can not think of a better icon than the question mark. But the question mark sort of implied (to me at least) that something was wrong.

Maybe this?

Yes

Edit: On a more serious note what about this? The question mark made me think something was wrong. This may have been less alarming but I don't know.

I have definitely ruled out your plugin. I can make this happen even without the RCF running. All I have to do is highlight a case structure and press CTRL-1. I thought it was your plugin because I just installed RCF to use it and it is the only plugin that I have. I never tried RCF under LV2010.

Although this has nothing to do with the Case Select Tool or even RCF here are some details below. I will post this to the NI forums as well and edit this post with a link. [Edit: Link]

Open the VI block diagram and do not change the selected case. Highlight the case structure with case "A One" selected and press CTRL-1. String constants in the other cases are resized to one character. Close but do not save the VI. Open it again and cycle through all the cases until you have seen the contents of each. Highlighting the case structure and pressing CTRL-1 does not resize the constants. Close and do not save the VI. Open it again and cycle through and view some but not all cases. Highlight the case structure and press CTRL-1. The cases you have not viewed will have the string constants resized to one character.

One other thing. Selecting any piece of code and pressing CTRL-1 marks the VI dirty. Explain changes says "The text format of a block diagram object was changed. This is just a cosmetic change."

First of all I want to say the Case Select tool is awesome!

I hope this is the right place to post about potential bugs. Something, either the Case Select plugin or the RCF is messing with my code. When I activate the tool some of the string constants in my cases get resized to one character. The size to text setting is still checked. This does not always happen but seems to happen when I activate the tool with a "section" separator selected.

I am using LabVIEW 2011, Case Select 3.0.0.4 and RCF 1.0.2.208-1 on Windows 7.

Test Case Select.vi

Ah that is what I was missing. I have never really used notifiers. The broadcast part is what I didn't know (or knew at one time and forgot)

For all intents and purposes is a notifier the same thing as a single element queue? If so does one perform better?

Thanks everyone for the replies. It is working now.

I am kind of frustrated because I don't know what the problem was. I rebuilt the VI from scratch and tested it in steps. I completed that and it still worked. I then cut and pasted the block diagram from the old VI into a new one and that worked as well. Unfortunately I saved the old VI and no longer have a broken one to investigate. This means I will be left with the icky feeling of never knowing what the problem was.

I am using classes - no XControls. I tried unchecking Remove Polymorphic Instances and that did not help. I don't have any disable structures. Also I am not using DSC.

Why is everyone's avatar all messed up? Is it just my eyes after writing LabVIEW all day?

Darren posted an idea to remove the dialog on the exchange. I initially liked it but then I thought that it is removing a feature. There is no other way to tell if all other cases are empty. This probably dates back to when there was no undo in LabVIEW so it probably should have a checkbox like "Do not ask me again"

Some more details: I have a main application that loads one of several VIs into a subpanel. Everything works if I run the main application from the development environment. If I build the main application standalone then the application state of the VI I want to load is bad. That VI is built as a source distribution and I can open it without errors either directly from LabVIEW or from my main application if the main application is not running standalone.

Instead of loading it into a subpanel I took your advice and just called FP open. Sure enough there is a broken run arrow. But if I click on the run arrow I get a dialog that says "VI has an error of type 302208. The full development version of LabVIEW is required to fix the errors." But there are no errors in the full development version.

I am in the process of elimination right now. Fortunately the VI is simple enough that I can recreate it in stages to find out what is breaking it. Once I find the problem it will likely be obvious and I will tell myself "Duh! You can't do that!". But surely there must be a more efficient troubleshooting method for these situations.

I open a VI with VI Server and the execution state is "bad". Is there any way to find out why it is bad? I can open this VI directly and it is ok and will run fine.

Yep. Exactly like that. I did a search but missed it. I thought something was wrong but I guess it is nothing to worry about.

Thanks!

I have a top level VI that has a subpanel. I open a VI containing a class control using VI Server, set the class control value, invoke run then load it into the subpanel. Everything works fine.

However when I build the top level VI the class control icon in the loaded subpanel is missing. Everything is otherwise functional.

The class I am using is from the LapDog Messaging Library which gets installed in vi.lib. I included the VI package in the attached project file.

Empty Icon - LV2010.zip

Another big plus for GIT is that the integrity of the repository is cryptographically verified. You can not change the history of or corrupt the repository without GIT noticing. With others you only notice your repository is corrupt when you get an old version of your code and find that your VIs will not open.

Heya all!

I posted a solution to the diff problem in the ni.com discussion forum. you can find it here:

http://forums.ni.com.../1047455/page/3

Merging seems to work fine with me, just by following the google doc that Ton Plomp suggested.

Hope you find it useful

Cool! I will look at this later. I have used GIT a lot but do not have any experience using it with LabVIEW.

There are many advantages to GIT or any decentralized SCC system. I do development at work on my laptop. I can VPN to the corporate network when I am working from home but sometimes I like to work in places where there is no internet connection. I have experienced horrible connections in hotels for example.

Does everyone know how GIT originated? It was written by Linus Torvalds - creator of Linux. He gave a really good presentation on GIT to the developers at Google who use Subversion a lot. He talks about his hatred of CVS and how he prefers "tarballs and patches" over that. He tells people that if they like SVN they should just leave. The developers of SVN say that it is "CVS done right". Linus claims that if this is their starting point there is nowhere to go because "you can not do CVS right"

GIT earned the reputation of being very difficult to use. It is heavily command line based (Look who developed it). But there are a lot of higher level tools now and you no longer need to use the command line. I think I recall seeing something that tunnels GIT over a VSS interface so that you can use it from the LabVIEW IDE.

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Let's talk. I've been chatting with Minh about a follow up discussion to my user group presentation last week. My guess is it will be late this week or early next week.

A followup would be good. The material is still somewhat fresh in peoples minds and I am sure there are some points that you didn't get to make since it was such a lively group ( that and because the pizza was 20 minutes late).

Sorry for the late reply Steve. I kept getting an error when I tried to reply to the LapDogApi thread, so I tried to use the email reply feature. Four days later the email bounced back to me.

Here's my original response:

No problems. The NI sites have been flakey lately. Since this seems particular to LapDog I wanted to post it there to hopefully spark more discussion of it. It sure is a low volume page. I then thought it might be better to put it here to increase visibility.

"No, you're not overlooking anything. There are a couple reasons I do it that way, none of which are enough of a concern to prevent you from downcasting internally.

Seems to me the difference is 95% stylistic, with *maybe* 5% being readability. As long as you're consistent the readability issue goes away. I wouldn't worry about it too much.

(Oh, and I like using messages bundled inside a user event to send data to the event loop too. It's way cleaner than creating all those user events manually.)

That totals 100% so it answers my question. I thought that later I might wish I had done the cast externally if I wanted to do something that does not occur to me right now.

I don't recommend modifying the LapDog classes directly--it can easily lead to maintenance issues down the road. Every time I release an update you'll have to go back and modify them all again. (Or choose not to update to later releases.) It also can create problems for future developers. ("I installed the LapDog Messaging package. Why isn't this working?")

I meant that I modified them and saved them in my own library. They look like this:

Also my create messages actually do more than just create the message. They create the messages and send them. I guess this is not really a modification but usage. I use the native types "in a modified way".

Does your next version expand the list of native types? Also would it be possible to use polymorphic VIs? This is something I might be willing to help you on. I think working with you on the project would be good excersize and this part is simple enough that I could probably handle it.

Messages return different types so they can not be overridden. My question really is about why the API was designed the way it was. I know there probably is a reason that I cannot think of. Just a curiosity is all.

Thanks. I mentioned that I posted it on the LapDogAPI group but forgot to put the link. Fixed.

I am in the process of modifying all the native types in LDM to take the parent class as the input and I am putting the to more specific class in those. As one of the LDM developers do you see any inherent problems with that? It does what I need it to but I was just curious why it is the way it is.

[Cross-posted to NI]

Yes as I mentioned I posted it there a week ago. The NI sites don't seem to get as much discussion as Lava does so I thought I would post it here. I hope that is ok. I am starting to think it is a dumb question.

I put a post on the LapDogAPI group six days ago but have not got any replies.

What I have started doing is to wire the parent message class to my get message VIs and do the cast in there. For me it seems too tedious to have to do the casting everytime that I get a message. In fact this is the very reason that I posted the "Wire Class to Case Selector" idea.

Instead of this

I can do this. The to more specific class is inside the SubVI.

Is there any reason not to do it like that?

Of course, LapDog Messaging has been available for over a year and I know of exactly one person other than myself who has tried it, so take that for what it's worth.

I use it. What I like most about it is it's simplicity. The community page lists 38 members. I'm sure I am not the only other guy who uses it

.llb files are old technology and don't work well for distributing classes. Packed project libraries *may* be an option, but there are lots of gotchas and you need to be careful. There isn't really a LVOOP-compatible equivalent of llb files yet.

I would like to take this opportunity to pimp one of my ideas on the Exchange - Bundled Project Library. Only 12 votes for something that will make all of this easier?

It contains all the benefits of a packed project library, llb and lvlib. The only reason I don't use llbs is that I can not always use llbs. The way I program these days I get name collisions more often than not.

I have put several ideas on the exchange and out of all of them this is the one I would most like to see implemented.