Chris Davis

I don't think NI is supporting XP 64 bit... Most software and hardware people are not supporting it, as far as I can tell. Even though it is now an offical version of XP you can buy.

My colleague and I fought this battle a few years ago with a C programmer while we were using LV 5.1 and 6i. Our argument was that we are not alone as labview programmers, we had all the labview resources from NI behind us. We knew we could develop a "faster" number crunching program in C, but we also knew we could not develop it faster than we could in LV. Now with all the gui improvements in the 7.x and 8.x series (not to mention 6.1, which was a huge leap forward for the gui) I feel like our faith in LV and its usefulness have been proven true. BTW, I learned LV (5.1.1 and 6) as a summer intern at my current workplace, then I had to go back to take one more year of school. I wanted to use LV so bad in my senior level courses, but alas, I had to use C, and Perl . I've used LV as a general purpose language from the first time I picked it up. I still use it 50% of the time as a general purpose language, even though most of my work now centers on the use of machine vision cameras in LV. :thumbup:

Finally found the example I was looking for. Search for Color Table Master on the NI dev zone, or follow this link. Enjoy!

This is a good replacement for the VI I snapshotted above! I was trying to find a color pallete creator example I saw a few years ago to post with this but I couldn't find it. Oh well! :headbang:

Hamlet is takin out the trash.. :ninja:

You should probably start using a mac too... no wait, they are getting to be to hip and cool, start using linux on a PXI chassis, then you can be cool! :thumbup:

I'll agree with the nerdy, but, you don't seem so white...

makes it sound like a kids movie, I wonder if they can do this with one of the nightmare on elm street movies...

Its scary what you can do with a video editor! :ninja:

As the original poster, I feel compelled to reply. I looked at OpenCV, I also looked as some of the open source / free toolkits that other users have worked with. I came back to the problem that Rolf has mentioned time and again. If you can't create something that is easy to maintain and easy to use, you are setting yourself up for a lot of time and maintenance effort. As Mike Ashe has mentioned, if you don't have some compelling examples and documentation your code will not be interesting to others. My problem is that one of the main programs I use only uses the display part of IMAQ. In an image acquisition program, whos only job is image acquisition, you only have to use the display part. Many of you may be saying that the display part of IMAQ is part of the NI-IMAQ (camera acquisition) distribution. Unfortunantly there are a few functions that I'm using that are not part of the NI-IMAQ distribution. Specifically the vis named Array to Image, as well as Get Pixel Pointer. These allow my program to use framegrabbers other than NI framegrabbers. I don't blame NI for not including these subroutines, but would be interested in a lower cost or free alternative IMAQ that would allow me to display images that I create. My problem hasn't gone away, but I have thought and tried a different solution. For those who have CVI you can check out the canvas control. For 8 bit or 32 bit color images you can use this CVI control (wrapped in a DLL) to display your images. I can't post the code for you, but I can tell you that after you read the CVI help and look at the CVI examples on the canvas control you will be able recreate what I did if "you know enough C to be dangerous." As it stands I'm going to check out Irene's IVision toolkit since it seems to be another alternative that I can use. I'm not trying to discourage anyone who might be interested in doing an open source alternative to IMAQ, but I've found my solution, and an alternate solution in case the canvas control can't do what I need.

Basler 504k or 504kc captured at 400 fps straight to disk for 1 minute. 1280x1024 (imager size) x 400 fps x70 seconds = 35 gb. I use the NI 1429 with an 8 drive SATA RAID. And before you ask, no I don't use LabView to write data that quick, I use CVI (actually I use Windows dlls), I use LabView and IMAQ to be the GUI for my imaging application. If you look at the OpenG Large File routines, you can begin to find out how I write data that quick to disk.

Using the .net controls also removes the possibility of taking advantage of the cross-platform capabilities in LabView. Since it didn't take me 5 minutes to create this button, I think I would create or "borrow" buttons when I need to rather than using the .net implimentation.

I didn't understand what you were trying to do, thanks for the picture. It sounds like you can't use a .net component in an XControl in LV8. IF you don't want to upgrade and have access to OpenG Tools you might take a look at some of the buttons there, specifically the "Load" button, its similar to the "New" and "Open" buttons in the LV 7 and 7.1 start up screen. These buttons have a menu associated with them. In LV 8 you also (finally) have access to the right click menu on controls, you might consider using that. If all else fails, you can always do what you want with the most underutilized LV control, the picture control. Your choice of programming languages is just that, your choice. In this case you will have to weigh the options, since you haven't told us all that you are trying to accomplish. Good Luck.

Since I'm the one that mentioned the zippered cases... Don't worry, you aren't missing anything that you couldn't get at Sprawl-mart for $10 or less... Of course that one wouldn't have the NI logo on it :laugh:

We may have missed the idea here. I think Michael may want something like what happens in Vis C or even CVI. These IDE's keep track of the last file you had open and open it when you open the "project". I could see that being useful. I could also see having the ability to specify a certain file open up for editing when starting a project.

My system button doesn't have 6 states, only 4. I did this work in LV 7. But 8 and 8.2 may have six states. I think NI added the highlight when mouseover occurs to LV 8+ system controls... BTW, I tried to see if I could modify the button's icon via scripting, but didn't find anything. Of course I could have missed it, since I have never tried any scripting before this... Michael, any idea if this work can be done with scripting?

Well I do like a challenge. At first I didn't care that the image didn't shift. But you threw down the guantlet... As others have mentioned you do start out with a new push button control. Open it in the control editor, then save it. Create another new control editor to put a system button into. Copy each picture item state from the system button to the push button. Then create a picture that you want to serve as part of your button, with a true and a false state. Copy to the clipboard the false state, then import it into the light part of the former push button. Import the true state into the true state of the light part of the push button and vola! you have a system control that also has an icon. I wonder if you can change the icon part programattically thru scripting? :ninja: Download File:post-2547-1158981245.ctl

The short answer is yes. You have to import the picture file as a decal. Then go into "tweezers" mode to move the decal to where you want it to show up on the button. Then you will have a system button with a "clickable" picture on it. See attached LV7 control as proof. Pardon the picture quality, I'm a programmer not an artist. Download File:post-2547-1158960979.ctl

Actually writing the file is not a problem, its reading back large chuncks of it. Try reading more than 8192 of your 128 byte strings at a time and you should get an error 6. BTW, my large files come from a vision camera where 35 gb can be made in one minute of acquisition. I had trouble with the Prepend Array or String size switch as well, but my problem was that I didn't know it was on be default. I made a subroutine to provide a progress bar to be used when copying big files. The VI reads 4 megabytes of the original file at a time as a string, then copies it to a new file. Finally figured out that the Prepend switch should be hard wired to false for my routine to work.

I grabbed these buttons from OpenG builder to be used in my own project (imatation is the best form of flattery!) So here are three LabView buttons from the system pallette with icons embedded in the buttons that change with the Windows XP theme. Hopefully this clears up some confusion.

I remember seeing and reading about CD-Rom servers, but that has been awhile. With disk space so cheap now, you could probably do a disk copy to a server drive when the disks come in and make that accessable to everyone... I've attached this stack to my server and users (there are just three) have the ability to eject a disk when they need to by using VNC to take control of the computer.

I've got four of these stacked for data storage. I don't have the NI CD's in them yet, but I do have other software and data burned to CD or DVD. Nice part about it is when I switch to HD DVD or BlueRay I can use the same system!

BTW, this bug has been fixed in LV 8.2.

Commander and Builder are linux, windows and mac compatable, I can't image that they would have built special buttons for each operating system. You could always check it by making (or coping from Commander or Builder) and checking on each platform you have to deal with. Chris