David Boyd

Probably the wrong forum, and I'm almost embarassed to ask, but:

If you've got an SSP, have you received your LV 8.20 distribution CDs by now? I got the impression from others on this forum that they've received theirs a few weeks ago, but I still haven't seen mine show up. I emailed my rep last week, who promised that they'd be shipping 'in a week or two'. Are you guys all working off the installer you FTP'd?

Dave

I would say that this is a BIG BUG. :thumbdown: Doing it this way is not much of a work around but it is a way to get what you want. it is just a shame that you cannot save a control the way you want it and have it stay that way.

It's funny how we can get Labview to do anything we want except for what we want it to do.

:headbang: Y'know, I STILL can't get this to work under LV8 - I've moved the code into a project (a step long overdue anyway), created a .ctl file w/in the project, &c., and gone back over your steps, and no joy. Did I mention that the containing object for the table is not the FP directly, but one of the pages of a tab control? You don't suppose this has anything to do with the behavior?

It's just a little wish - just one of those UI dress-ups you turn your attention to when the project has reached the 90%+ functional mark.

Thanks again for all the experimentation on my behalf.

Dave

I just figured out something else, If I do everything you say I can recreate what you see. But in LV 8.20 if you open a blank project and then do everything from inside the project the VI and controls are just fine. And they also are able to be built into an EXE OK.

It also does not matter if the control is type def'd or not.

Weird.

So far I'm unable to get this to work - I recreated the customized control w/in a LV 8.0 project, along with a VI which uses it, but it still seems to show the default scrollbar appearance once reloaded. Sorry, but can you give me a step-by-step of how you did this workaround?

Thanks so much to you and to Scott for knocking this around - this is why I love the online LabVIEW community so much.

Best,

Dave

Dave,

Sorry to report that the behavior is unchanged in 8.20.

What I've seen (both in 8.0 and 8.20) is that the typedef does retain the customizations, but you only see them if you open the typedef while a containing VI is in memory. If you open only the typedef itself (or open it first) you won't see the customizations. Very weird...

Regards,

Scott

Thanks, Scott, for confirming this... I neglected to add that I did observe this behavior when I checked a LV version *ahem* between 8 and 8.20.

And just now I opened my typedef file and Hey Presto! there's my 'fat' scrollbar... so your observations about the order of opening TD vs. VI seem to be confirmed. If only there were a way to trick LV into using all the custom control's attributes when on the FP....

Dave

To demonstrate, do the following:

1) On a new VI, drop a table control from the 'List & Table' palette.

2) Popup and invoke the control editor on the table.

3) Show Parts Window. Change the width of the Y scrollbar from default (17) to 32 pixels.

4) Change the width of the frame from default (250) to 265 (to match the scrollbar change).

5) Apply changes, then dispose the control editor window.

6) Observe that the table has the 'fat' vertical scrollbar. Save and close the VI.

7) Reopen the VI - the scrollbar reverts to default width.

I also tried saving the control as a strict typedef. The typedef retains the change when reopened, but instances of it on VI FPs don't reflect the modification. EDIT: The typedef does not retain the change either - I may have had it lurking on my clipboard when I tried it earlier.

I wanted a 'fat' scrollbar for my touchscreen UI...

My guess, FWIW: this is a bug related to the 'BigSavings' introduced in LV8 to reduce VI footprint on disk.

What I'd really like is for someone to check whether this behavior remains in 8.20 - I haven't received my 'official' SSP CDs, so I don't have it installed.

Best regards,

Dave

Why not use the Search and Replace?

(Insert head-smack noise here.) Doh!

Michael, sometimes the obvious solution just doesn't occur to me... This method looks to be clean and 100% reliable - after all, NaN always gets converted to the string "NaN", so it's a cinch to do the fixup in the string.

Thanks a bunch!

Dave

Hello all-

Was having this discussion with my coworker today, and he swears he saw a clever example of this somewhere - the task at hand is to convert doubles to strings for eventual display in a table. I regularly use NaN to indicate lack of a measured value, and I was lamenting all the extra nodes it takes, to test for isNaN?, then a select node, and an empty string constant, just to suppress the 'NaN' text, which is meaningless to my end users. Plus, while I want to format multiple doubles into a row of the table, I can't use an expandable Format Into String node if I need to do this testing and selecting.

So, is there some undocumented format code to conditionally format an NaN? Or is he confusing this with Excel's conditional formatting?

Best regards,

Dave

Hi, I know this might not me the right place to post this but I've used this forum before and I got great help from it.

I just need to know if there are any programs or softwares to monitor the GPIB pins, i.e. for serial port or RS232 there is this program called PORTMON that monitor all trafic that happens in the RS232 of the computer, but is ther anything of similar sort for the GPIB.

Thanks in advanced.

If you only want to trace GPIB activity between your own LV code and one or more GPIB devices, you can do this with the NI-Spy application which comes standard with an installation of NI-VISA, NI-GPIB, MAX, etc. You can set it to capture different levels of calls and returns.

Hope this helps.

Dave

Salut.

I want to import the GetVolumeInformationW function from the Windows kernel32.dll.

Just off the top of my head :

Many or most of the functions in kernel32 have both widechar and ANSI versions (like GetVolumeInformationW and GetVolumeInformationA). The prototyping in the .h file has some fancy #ifdef directives which get you to one or the other version, if you're a C compiler, since the C programmer just uses the syntax GetVolumeInformation, which is platform-independent. I think that the wizard is able to parse more straightforward header files, but loses all hope when presented with one of the Windows core components headers.

You can look up all the kernel32, advapi, winspool, etc. function documentation using the online MSDN references, then do all the CLN configuration yourself. It's a drag, but I just don't think the new wizard is capable of following all the preprocessor #ifdefs and nested #includes found in the header files you have.

Sorry this isn't the answer you sought.

Best regards,

Dave

Hello,

I am working on a simple excersise. I'd like to automatically reset my Total (please refer to my attached VI) to 0 (basically resetting my shift register to 0) when it reaches a certain value, let say 20. Could anyone help me make that happen? I am stuck.

Thanks,

MC

Just for completeness' sake, I'll add a slight variation on Mike's reply - perform the test for > 19, then feed that to the boolean terminal of a 'Select' primitive. This is the triangular-shaped node on the 'Comparison' palette which is the LV equivalent of the C syntax:

s ? t : f

Wire the shift register leftside to the 'f' input, your constant zero to the 't' input, and the output to the shift register rightside.

Same result as the case structure, but a little more readable - you don't have to flip the case structure to see its alternate-case code.

Hope this helps!

Dave

Hi!

I'm looking for a TTS, Text-to-speach, engine for LabView in windows. Had a look at the ms-agent but didnt like it.

Is there another TTS anywhere?

Cheers

This is really oh-so-easy under Windows. All Windows XP installations have the ActiveX support for the Microsoft Speech API (SAPI 5.1). The VIs in the zipfile posted by Jacendom have most all the functionality you'll typically need, though on quick inspection, the 'Speak' VI seems a bit cumbersome to me - every time it's called, it also goes through all the voice/volume/speechrate stuff as well. This should be broken out into separate VIs which pass the ActiveX refnum through.

For some reason I can't fathom, WinXP only ships with the 'Microsoft Sam' voice, which is pretty tedious to listen to - 'Sam' has a few 'speech impediments'. If you do some digging around MS's developer site, you should be able to find the free downloads for 'Mary' and 'Mike' - Mary is (IMO) the clearest of the bunch, and (under SAPI 4) was the default shipping voice with Windows 2000. If you want more voices, you can purchase other SAPI 5 compliant voices from AT&T, IBM ViaVoice, Cepstral, and others - Google on "SAPI5 compliant TTS voice". This is where you'll also find support for other languages, too.

Forget about Agent. Last I knew, it still depended on SAPI4 for its TTS abilities, and comes with a lot of extraneous baggage - little animated genies and such - if all you really want is TTS.

Happy mechanical talking!

Dave

I'll upload 2 of the 5 packets I was sent, as the total size of the 5 is like 15 meg or so.

Aaack, ptui! I agree with Philippe - I just took a peek at the BD of the 146chart.vi, without all its support subVIs, and it's hideous.

Too bad you're not using the MKS 179A/1179A massflow controllers - I have a classic, pure-G set of VIs for controlling the serial RS-485 version of this series. Wrote 'em myself in, 5.1, I think, and I keep reusing them over and over.

You'll definitely be looking for outside help if you're on a deadline. Probably anyone you contract with will need to code at least a minimal set of VIs for controlling the 146. Properly planned, they'll be easily expanded and form a great reuse library.

Sorry I can't offer anything up on this device.

Dave

I am collecting 24 bit words from a serial source as an array and converting them (2 s compliment) to integers I32.

Starting out with a 24 boolean element array I move the sign bit (23) to element 31 after resizing the array to 32 bits. From there it is an array to integer conversion.

It works ok but I am wondering if I am overlooking a more elegant way of doing this.

Thanks

Perhaps the attached will be of some use to you.

These little data manipulation problems can be solved in so many ways, since LV has a pretty complete set of polymorphic primitives. The VI I've attached is just one way to get there, I'm sure someone else will come along with a cleaner and/or faster approach

Best regards,

Dave

Download File:post-195-1150951577.vi

TTY was an abrieviation for "TeleTYpe" as in ASR-33 the old mechanical "tele-typewriter".

The oldest ones may only have used 7-bit encoding.

Let's go even farther back. The oldest Teletypes with which I'm acquainted used a 5-bit encoding called Baudot (pronounced appropriately as the French inventor's surname). With only 32 possible combinations, this required that two bit patterns, designated 'LTRS' and 'FIGS', were used to shift the machine between two interpretations of all subsequent characters. Was widely in use during WW II - I remember my father had a rolled-up spool of punched tape which was a transcript of a letter he'd sent to his older sister, who was serving elsewhere in the armed forces at the time. In the 70's (my teen years), I had a computer instructor who wrote some PDP-8 assembler to read the tape on an 8-bit reader (anybody remember device "PTR:"?), and translate the codes for printing.

Sorry for all the archeological diversion...

Best regards,

Dave

Wasn't there an undocumented way to select a section of BD and turn it into a so-called "inline" subVI? IIRC, what actually happened was a process similar to the 'create subVI' action, except the code got placed inside a single-frame-sequence which was then shrunk down to the size of a subVI conpane. This, of course, could be copied and pasted.

Does anybody else have a clue what I'm talking about?

Dave

Justin,

I'm surprised that nobody followed up on your posting, though I don't know what the 'correct' behavior is for the null length match situation you described. (It's sort of a 'pathological case'.)

However, I've recently been trying to use the new PCRE Match Regular Expression primitive, and I've found another behavior that I'd tentatively call a bug. It sure 'smells' like some kind of holdover from C string functions, since it involves null character matching (null, as in character value of 0x00).

Basically, I can't find any way to create a regex that will match to a character pattern which has a null character within it. The pattern matching always splits the input string at the nullchar, and if I include \x00 anywhere in the regex (to try to explicitly match the nullchar), the entire matching fails.

I don't have any Perl experience - can anyone else tell me if my assumptions are faulty here?

Best regards,

Dave

P.S. I can't identify the node in the diagram below - is/was it a primitive, or was it a VI that had a yellow icon? Can you tell me where to find it?

EDIT: OK, here's what I'm talking about.

This is the same subject and the same regex, but the old PCRE library returns a successful match, and also returns the proper (strictly speaking) null string in the substrings array.

Hi Dave,

Sorry you had to go through all this hassle...I thought the problem was only with the Upgrade Advisor, but apparently our ISRs are quoting the incorrect price as well. I have contacted the proper authorities to get this addressed as soon as possible.

-D

P.S. - In addition to the two major issues I previously mentioned, there are also several minor bug fixes in RGT 1.1.1 that I threw in there because I had time. Let me know if you'd like more information on those.

Thanks, Darren, and I really didn't want to give the impression that I'm upset - in fact I've managed to use the RGT a little in the past few months, am getting ready to use it some more under LV8, and like AMSLLC, I'm happy with it, if just for what it can do to abstract away most of the Excel automation stuff.

I just sent an email to my inside sales rep and asked him to double-check the upgrade based on your response. If there are release notes for 1.1.1, I'll peruse those when I eventually get the CD in my hands. Otherwise, I'll bug you for the gory details.

Thanks again!

Dave

For those who don't know this toolkit comes with the Developer Suite.

<thread highjacking>

To change the subject just slightly, if you don't have the Developer Suite, you might want to check into it now. NI is giving awsome discounts for those who already own LV or CVI, or any

.

.

.

</thread highjacking>

Chris,

Hijack away! Over the past several years we've amassed licenses at this facility for LV, TS, MS, plus RT, the RGT, the DCT, so by now we almost surely coulda/woulda/shoulda gone for a DevSuite. Though I'm loath to go back to my boss to ask for more $$$ for 'more LabVIEW stuff', your experience makes me wonder if we might come out ahead. Thanks for sharing your experience. Maybe it's time for our NI inside sales person to 'sharpen his pencil'.

Best regards,

Dave

Hi Dave,

There were two main fixes in the 1.1.1 update...the first, as you mentioned, is the palette incompatibilities between RGT 1.1 and LabVIEW 8.0. The second issue is the fact that the MS Office Report Express VI from RGT 1.1 did not work properly in LabVIEW 8.0.

Just the other day I noticed that the Upgrade Advisor was not properly "advising" regarding an upgrade from 1.1 to 1.1.1. This should be a free upgrade. The $195 price should be for users upgrading from 1.0.x to 1.1.1. I have already talked to our web team about getting the Upgrade Advisor fixed to reflect the $0 cost that *should* apply to an RGT 1.1 to RGT 1.1.1 upgrade. For now, you should be able to contact our sales department to get a copy of the RGT 1.1.1 CD sent to you free of charge.

Let me know if you have any other questions,

-D

Darren,

Thanks for confirming what I had hoped - that a dot-dot-1 release would be a free bugfix. My inside sales person was apologetic when quoting me the upgrade price, so I'll I'll have to check back with him. Though I probably don't care about the Express VI issue, I would like the 'proper' fix for the palette incompatibility.

Take care,

Dave

If anyone has a recent copy of the Report Generation for Office toolkit (at version 1.1.1), I'd appreciate it if they could describe to me, or send me, the release notes. I bought a copy less than a year ago (at release 1.1) and recently found that it's 'broken' under LV8. The NI Advisor is offering me an upgrade to 1.1.1 for only 195 USD, which I find a little offensive for a toolkit that's broken by a LV release . I think I fixed the LV8 compatibility problem (seems like it's just some issues with the palette menus), but I can't even find any updated documentation on the NI site.

Thanks for reading...

Dave

OK, it's been awhile since I even HAD a C compiler installed on my PC, but here goes:

i have a const double array, and when i want to copy a value, for example:

typedef struct { double x, y, z} array3;  // you've defined 'array3' to mean a structure containing three double-precision floating-point elementsconst array3* v; // you've instanciated a pointer to a constant 'array3' and named the pointer 'v'double my_value;  // you've instanciated a double-precision floating-point named 'my_value'my_value = v->x;  // you tried to assign to 'my_value' the value of the 'x' element of the struct pointed to by 'v'// ... but you never assigned 'v' a value (i.e., reserved memory for an 'array3' and pointed 'v' at it)

and labview crashes, (looks like you tried to dereference a null pointer) and the debug window shows this line as the cause. with some access violation error messages....

anybody encountered something like this? please help me... thank you!

Did I get it right??

Hope this helps,

Dave

No, I have that input unwired. Hmm... I wonder if that may be the problem -- After a number of runs of the program, Windows starts giving out local ports which are out of range for the other computers. Is that possible? Would I be ok to give the same Remote Port and Local Port?

A good free tool that I've used in the past for troubleshooting these sorts of problems is TCPview from SysInternals. If the problem really is as you've suggested, TCPview would make this evident by listing lots of connections in the 'CLOSE_WAIT' state, tying up local ports. Just my 2 cents' worth...

Best regards,

Dave

P.S. And no, you don't want to try to use the same port number on both sides of the connection. At least for 'well-known' ports, that would be simply impossible (i.e., you couldn't likely connect to a web server's port 80 and specify port 80 for your end of the connection. Your OS would most probably disallow you from using any of the 'well-known' ports in such a way.)

If this was buried in the LV8 release notes, I missed it.

Certain of the front panel indicators have had a change to their behavior with the release of LV8. It appears that, for FP objects which display a needle on an arc scale (e.g., the knob, the meter, the gauge), if the object has a value of NaN, the needle is not drawn.

I actually think this is a useful enhancement, since any other indication could be construed as misleading, though I'd be interested in hearing what others think about this behavioral change.

Now, why this change doesn't seem to have been applied to the FP objects with linear scales (e.g., the thermometer, the tank, the horizontal and vertical slides), I couldn't say. I think the same rationale could be used here for drawing/hiding the fill color or the 'thumb'.

Anybody know more about this?

Dave

You might want to search both NI DevZone and the Info-LabVIEW archives. Seems I remember that someone used the MS Windows Agent API (complete with the little "Wizard" with the doofus hat) and posted VIs to get you started. That covers Text-to-Speech. I thought that the same threads on IFLV touched on voice recognition.

I first started with the MS Agent API way back when I was first trying to incorporate TTS into my LabVIEW app. I got frustrated with it because so much of the API is concerned with drawing little floating genies, wizards, robots, etc, when all I wanted was a voice. As far as I know, Agent is still based on the version 4.0 release of the Speech API, which is at an evolutionary dead end. Bottom line - I would avoid it, and go the SAPI 5.1 route. One caveat - the SAPI 5 full SDK installation is massive, on the order of 500 megabytes. If you can get past that, the redistributables are pretty reasonable in size, and I'm pretty sure that all Windows XP installations come with TTS support and at least one English TTS voice (Microsoft 'Sam', my least-favorite... MS 'Mary' is much clearer). 'Mary' and 'Mike' are available as a freely distributable download.

Of course, the original posting was about speech recognition, so all my blather about TTS is beside the point anyway.

Dave

Hello,

I thought of making an application with voice recognition, but I would save a lot of time if LabVIEW would already provide such code. Is there something like that?

If you're content to run under Windows only, you might want to look into the Microsoft Speech API (SAPI 5.1). There is already a complete framework for creating speech-enabled applications which is exposed through a very extensive set of automation objects and interfaces.

Generating text-to-speech from LabVIEW is pretty trivial. I wrote my first TTS LV application over 5 years ago. Getting speech recognition to work is a good deal more complex, I'll admit I've never tried it. A lot of the complexity depends on whether you want to implement a speaker-independent interface with a very limited vocabulary, or if you need context-free continuous recognition, which requires a training sequence where the recognizer 'learns' a particular human voice.

You might start here.

Good luck and best regards,

Dave

Aesthetics. Pure aesthetics

Joe (orko)

Of course, to be really faithful to the retro look, you would need to have paddle switches with labels like 'Examine' and 'Deposit/Next'.

Something similar to this...

...perhaps?

Dave