Michael Aivaliotis

Why are you saving the all VIs after the build?

Yes, this user has already been banned. It seems to be an isolated incident of messages sent through the forums personal message system. If you have notifications on for PMs it will email the message to you.

I'm investigating a project that requires LabVIEW communication with a Beckhoff controller. If there's someone that has time to work with me on this project and has the experience please send me a Personal Message. - Thank You.

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Thanks.

14 hours ago, Maciej Kolosko said:

This is bad for the future of the G programming language in my opinion.

Yes, it's bad.

41 minutes ago, X___ said:

Can't say that the rationale for the decision is put particularly convincingly... We'll have to wait for the dust to settle to really figure out what this corporate double-speak means. Do they even know themselves?

I agree. I can't see this as anything other than a complete PR disaster for them. I don't have any confidence they know what they're doing. It's gonna take a couple years for the dust to settle.

14 hours ago, hooovahh said:

And the fact that it seems to have already crawled LAVAs Code Repository means a few of my tools are already there and looking nice

Who gave JKI permission to do this?

Thanks. Seems like a bug then.

I use Parallels. Have been using it for years. They have a one-time price point and also a subscription model.

It's the best in my opinion. I use it for professional work. If you are a hobbyist or don't want to spend money, then go for Virtual Box. I've heard some people use it just fine. It's free so you can just try it.

Running LabVIEW 2019f3

I found a potential bug and need your help to determine if it's real or not. Quick search didn't come up anyone reporting it.

I have 3 classes. Class1 contains Class2. Class2 contains Class3. Now, if I try to drop Class1 into the private data of Class3, LabVIEW will report an error and prevent this action. Mainly because you will have recursion, which is not allowed. This is all fine and expected. Even if Class1 is inside a cluster or a DVR or any other "wrapper", LabVIEW detects this as recursion and reports an error (broken VI).

However, I am able to "break" this check if I put Class1 as the data of a Map. It seems like LabVIEW cannot detect the recursion, in this case. I don't think this is intended behavior. Even though the VI does not break. I notice some bad behavior. Application builder hangs or terminates halfway through. Also the app takes forever to startup and run in source code (probably due to compiler churn?).

I did not try to do this intentionally. It was on accident, and was curious why it even worked. After I noticed the application build issues, i backtracked to the latest changes and guessed this was the issue. I haven't changed my code yet, but thought I'd post here first. If this is normal behavior then I should look elsewhere for my build issues.

Edit: So I played around a bit more with this. I don't need to be elaborate and use 3 Classes. You can just drop a Class inside the Map data and then drop the Map inside the Class itself and LabVIEW will not complain. This even works with Sets.

This was resolved already.

I flipped a switch. Let me know if anything changes.

I'll take a look.

I will complete the survey but wanted to add here as well. I use EtherCAT primarily with 3rd party slaves and only use NI hardware\software. I have limited time resources and prefer to stay within one environment, so I choose NI software whenever I can. I just don't have time to learn all the 3rd party tools. Maybe others can help me here. if anything, at least this thread has brought other ECAT experts to the surface, I can DM for help 😉. I have come across a few limitations but I have been able to work around them because I have no choice.

One thing that is frustrating is there is no way to define a topology with NI tools. I'm sure there is an algorithm that defines this under the hood, but it's not controllable by the user. If you have a daisy-chain setup, then it follows that, however if you add a switch to the mix then I have no clue how it's determined. This is critical to the software development side since device IDs matter and they change. If you pull out a device from the chain, then the downstream device IDs change. this can get frustrating from a configuration management perspective. Device IDs are settable on some 3rd party devices with physical switches but the NI tools cannot query these IDs for some reason. This would help make the topology a little more predictable. Another limitation I ran into recently. FOE is not fully supported. FOE WRITE is supported but not FOE READ. I think in general the ECAT tools need a higher level API that can be used within LabVIEW. For example, the EtherCAT Library for LabVIEW from Ackermann Automation is a good example. It seems NI put in the bare minimum required to meet the standard and support one or two of their own hardware with little consideration for third party devices. As others have posted, basic error handling on faulty ESI files should be baked-in.

I get an error 7, file missing error when I run the app builder Build.vi provided by NI (visible in the palettes).

Quote

NI_LVConfig.lvlib:Load.vi<ERR> C:\Users\MichaelA\AppData\Local\Temp\AB_Cache_{DD695C27-7E5F-4A88-8B25-B389D65799CC}.txt <b>Complete call chain:</b>      NI_LVConfig.lvlib:Load.vi      NI_LVConfig.lvlib:Open Config Data.vi      AB_RW_Project_Cache_Info.vi      BuildMonitor_Clean.vi      CleanTarget.vi      NI_App_Builder_API.lvlib:Clean.vi      build exe - vishots.vi      Build_App2.vi

I've seen this issue a few times with various projects. I'm not sure what causes it, but there's no way to recover from it quickly. The only thing that fixes it, that I've found, is to manually execute a build from the project build spec. This seems to fix the missing cache issue. After a manual build is done, Automated builds using the build.vi work as expected without errors, multiple times.

I don't need or care for the new VIPM browser. How can I stop it from launching all the time and staying resident. I have to keep manually exiting it every time. An option in VIPM to turn it off would make sense. I would like to make my own decisions to use a feature and not have it forced upon me. I have not seen where this is configured.

I've been trying the "save for previous" feature in LabVIEW. It gets stuck in this dialog and LabVIEW just freezes and I have to terminate it. I was down-saving a VI that was part of a class and it called a couple classes as well. So it wasn't just a single VI.

Does the "save as" really work? Curious if others have success with this feature.

On 7/3/2020 at 10:43 AM, Jim Kring said:

Thanks for helping everyone out. Older versions of VIPM are available to users -- we have a link on the vipm.io/download page for users. However, since older versions of VIPM use outdated LV runtime engines that are longer be supported by NI and don't work well on newer OS'es, we don't encourage users to use them -- it often creates more problems for them, and a support burden for JKI and NI. As such, we ask that people do not post older downloads and instead direct people to get them from either NI or the VIPM websites. Again, thanks for helping people out.

Can you provide a public link where people can download VIPM 2019? So far I haven't seen one, unless I missed it.

18 hours ago, smithd said:

it makes me want to install packages with 7zip.

Well, they are zip files.

8 hours ago, drjdpowell said:

Thanks, guys, I've downgraded to 2019 for now, and made a bug report at JKI.

I tried VIPM2020. It was buggy for me. I also didn't like the new login "feature" and the notification taskbar malware. So I reverted to VIPM2019.

On 6/23/2020 at 7:24 AM, Mads said:

Is it seriously based on people having to use the command line to install packages?🤦‍♂️ The main selling point of LabVIEW is that it is *graphical*....and it is trying to force everyone to use the command line??

I know there is a GUI for it, I've seen it. But the marketing for it, does not promote it anywhere. I wish I could quickly point to where that is, but unless it's accessible from the homepage, you lost me. If you take the philosophy that GUIs are not for real programmers, then you will start to align with GPMs design language.

On 6/25/2020 at 6:13 AM, drjdpowell said:

I would like to downgrade to VIPM 2019, but I cannot find the installer for that anywhere.

I've attached VIPM 2019 installer.