DMC Engineering

Let’s face it, us engineers and scientists like graphs. It’s very common for a user to desire an image capture of data displayed in their program to share with their friends and colleagues. There’s quite a few nice features native to LabVIEW that makes this process easy and convenient. Here is a description of three good options: Manual Save, Programmatic Save, and Save Entire Tab. To access the photos of these graphs, you can find them in my blog: http://www.dmcinfo.com/Blog/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/969/Programmatic-Saves-of-LabVIEW-Plots-and-Charts.aspx Manual Save You can manually right-click any graph or plot during runtime and select Export > Export Simplified Image. Choose a name for your *.bmp image and directory and save an exact image of the graph to disk. Notice that LabVIEW automatically changes the default black graph background to white, but doesn’t alter any of your active plot trace colors. Also note that a graph save captures only what is seen by the user during that instant. Programmatic Graph Save This save feature is also available programmatically through LabVIEW methods. When not running, right-click on the graph you’d like to save during runtime and create a reference. Find and select the graph method “Export Image”. Wire the ‘Image Data’ output from the node into one of the image write VIs found in the ‘Graphics and Sound’ > ‘Graphics Formats’ palette. Make sure to append the correct file extension to your path. While you’re here, you should automatically change the background and plot trace colors to more desirable selections. This will cause the graph to flash briefly during the save but will create a much nicer image. Save Entire Tab Often the graph doesn’t contain all necessary information such as user parameters governing the process. If these setting are available near the graph on a tab control, you can take a screenshot of the open tab and save it to disk. The method is very similar to the single graph save, but simpler since the graph colors don’t need to be altered. Hopefully you will find these methods useful and easy to implement!

For years I have been looking for a good implementation of NI MAX that I could encapsulate and throw into my LabVIEW apps so that customers can edit measurement channels, scaling, calibration, etc. from inside of my application instead of having to explain to them what NI MAX is, how to use it, what not to modify, etc. Unfortunately there hasn’t been a straight forward way to do this, so I’ve either ended up resorting to MAX and having 2 applications that end users have to worry about or to building simplified channel editors in LabVIEW that inevitably fall short of some basic needs like calibration or scaling. Below I have posted a link to a set of DAQmx tools that allow you to integrate the NI MAX Assistants directly into your code! The attached .llb includes all of the files you need to try out these VI’s which will let you call assistants to create or edit DAQmx channels, tasks, and scales! (Obviously you will need to have MAX installed to use these, and they support LabVIEW versions 8 and up.) Hope you find this as helpful as I did... http://www.dmcinfo.com/blog.aspx/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/256/LabVIEW-DAQmx-Assistant-VIs.aspx

I was recently looking into this, and it might be worth looking into even if you are a smaller group of people assessing the code at this point in time. Effective use of SCC takes discipline because what is not checked into the repository is not saved. Opening a project several years after the fact to find out that the latest code resided on a long decommissioned computer is not a pleasant experience. It is in everyone's best interest to make sure that code is properly stored in the repository at all key points of the project's lifecycle. The best way to maximize the effective utilization of SCC is to make it as easy to use for your staff as possible. As a result, we use a combination of two tools to manage our source code. The first is Tortoise SVN, an explorer shell based SCC system which works for almost any project type. The ease of use and concurrent-development options of TSVN have dramatically boosted our ability to collaborate, release and maintain code. By itsef, TSVN is revolutionary if you are coming from an older style of source code control. Paired with Visual SVN Server, the benefits become even more pronounced. Here is a link for more information: http://www.dmcinfo.c...t-anywhere.aspx Hope that is at very least, informative!

This has been a topic of consideration for us recently. Did a little investigation and thought we would share with you all. Here is a link to some of the codes and formulas we used: http://www.dmcinfo.com/blog.aspx/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/183/categoryId/6/LabVIEW-formula-nodes--faster-or-not.aspx