Grampa_of_Oliva_n_Eden

Salut.

Considering the constant flow of new users to the LAVA forum and the relative "quietness" of info-labview, i'm wondering if everyone just made the move from info-labview? Or are the info-labview users on vacation or just to busy...

If the info-labview list is to die of its natural end of usefulness, i have to say that i would never have been able to grow that far from where i started without it.

I will have succeeded when i'm no longer needed!

Excellent observation.

I also learned a lot about LbVIEw by monitoring that e-mail list.

If it does eventually go away, I suspect it will be due to two of its basic tenants.

1) Since it is user run and maintained, there is nobody pointing to it to bring in new participants.

2) Its "text only format" is sadly lacking when talking about a graphic language.

Ben

Enough folks liked this so red is now the default color in LV8.2.

New tip that may not be known:

Common frustration: Have a structure node on diagram. Drop a string control inside it and start typing. At some point the string reaches the boundary of the node. If you have autogrow turned on, your structure will start stretching. If you have autogrow turned off, your string will vanish under the edge of the structure. Either way, not desirable. So you click away from the string, resize it, maybe turn on scrollbars, then start typing again.

But... from LV7.0 forward...

After you drop the string control, type for a while. When the string reaches the max width that you want, hit shift+Enter. Keep typing. The string will now wordwrap at the current width, and grow vertically. When you reach the maximum desired height, hit shift+Enter again. The vertical scrollbar will appear and the string will now scroll instead of growing any further.

Sorry... the trick doesn't work on free labels. Perhaps someday...

Thank you Stephen!

You have made at least four developers very happy today. Myself and the first three engineers I talked too.

I also added a link so the Nugget Master can find his way here.

Ben

I am finding that none of the proposed methods will work in my case. The screen saver in question is apparently network administered and designed not to be foiled. It's purpose is to force a login prompt if the computer is not used for 1800 seconds. The screen saver settings appear to be locked. I have even tried some registry hacks but they do not stick. I had assume there would be some way to fake user activity but ordinary mouse and keyboard events do not work.

Hi Sachsm,

I asked the same question in this thread

http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?boar...d=114553#M52654

about three years ago. None of the posted replies worked for me but there maybe something there that can help you.

Ben

If I had a time machine and a license to kill....

There are two people I would chase down.

The person who decide that men should shave

and

the person who invented computer viruses.

So I guess I should start a dozen or more LabVIEW websites to increase the index eh? :laugh:

Gettings serious about this idea...

Could something as simple as making sure the term "LabVIEW" appears in all of our signatures make a difference?

If only the top 6 contributors to the NI web-site changed our signatures, that would result in about 20,000 additional seach hits.

Could it be that simple?

Probably not...

Ben

Slightly OT

Is the 64-bit OS required?

I have recently deployed a LV app to a 64 bit machine running the 32-bit version of Windows XP.

Aside from the machine being twice as fast as the old one (what a difference 8 proccesors make :thumbup: ) you would not have noticed the difference.

Forgive the distraction please!

Ben

I have spent I-don't-know how many hours working with ways to build, transpose, and graph many-dimensional arrays. Many = more than 2. But lately I wonder: what the heck was I thinking? Why not just do everything with one-dimensional arrays of data, plus an additional one-dimensional array (per array) of sizes? Then when push comes to shove (i.e. it's time to graph something or save to a file) use Reshape Array as needed?

Additionally I'm thinking, this might save me the need to convert to and from variants in order to create a don't-care-how-many-dimensions-it-really-has array variable. After all, in this approach all arrays have "one dimension" regardless of how many they "really" have.

Now, surely this has all been done before, so please, point me to it. Also if you have experience with this kind of thing, please share your Do's and Don't's.

See reply #9 in this thread from back before LAVA was invented.

http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?boar...id=84171#M34111

Ben

Well, I guess it hasn't worked for anybody . Maybe in the future I'll come to an easier way of doing the same.

Saludos,

Aitor

Hi Aitor,

I was very excited when I saw your initial post becuase I have wanted to do things like that many times.

Unfortunatley my laptop disk crashed :headbang: and I have not managed to get any of my LV versions installed (silly nilm.exe is cloning itself and gobbling up all of my CPU, I digress ).

So speaking for myself, your posting looks very interesting and I am planning to learn something from it as soon as I can.

Ben

... few locals... I tried to grab some screen shots, but like I said, the code is too large to see anything meaningful in one screen capture...

As of now I am happy with the performance, just disappointed the 30gig hard drive on the PXI is just about useless for my application...oh well...

thanks for the help!

The "Execution Trace Toolkit" should help ID the issues. Lacking a screen shot of the TC Loop, I do not think I can add anything further.

Have fun!

Ben

Christian Altenbach started a "Rube Goldberg Code" thread in the BreakPoint of the NI-Developer Exchange and can be found at this link.

http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?boar...4&jump=true

Ben

I tried to flush the file more often, and it made no difference...does realtime use the flush command the same way as windows?

Relf, the code is pretty much just one huge block diagram (real time type code) so a screen shot would only show a small portion of the diagram. JFM, TCP/IP streaming sounds like a good idea, i am going to try it now, I'll let you all know how it works out.

thanks!

There are a zillion things that can kill the determinism of a timed loop.

Could you post images of the TC loop please?

Wild guess?

Are you using any pink clusters in the TC loop?

Your diagram will help us help you!

Ben

I've searched various forums and haven't been able to find a discussion of this yet. (I did post it on the NI forums yesterday, but I wanted to get the feedback of this group as well.)

After installing 8.20, I finally went back to a 7.1 project and tried to open it. It uses Traditional Daq, and the relevant sub-vi pallette has been completely removed! Is this a known limitation? Did I do something wrong? Can it be avoided? Is there a fix?

I tried running the Device Drivers CD from both the 8.20 distribution and the 7.1 distribution, but neither was able to replace the 7.1 LV VI's. The 8.20 CD says it has LabVIEW support for Traditional Daq, but it doesn't expand further to mention which versions are covered.

Upon further investigation, I realize that the Traditional Daq VIs have also been removed from 8.0! Only 8.20 has Traditional Daq VIs!

I consider this unacceptable and inadequate. I keep numerous versions of LabVIEW alive on my development machines. I have to to keep maintaining various projects of various ages. The current situation is going to make this very hard!

Regards,

Dave T.

Hi Dave,

See this thread form NI Dev-Exchange were I tried very hard not to cry. :headbang:

http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?boar...d=22001#M171440

To properly support applications in multiple versions, you will need unique machines or you will have to get clever with booting and backups.

I have frozen one machine at LV 7.1.

I have another that is for LV 8+.

Sorta looks like a set of big speakers. :thumbup:

Ben

It is also exposed in the .lvproj file....

<Property Name="SourceItem[0].PasswordToApply" Type="Str">Secret</Property>

Ton

:headbang:

Ben

I added a Source Distribution to my project and used the "Source File Settings" page to set the password for the containing folder.

After opening the NEW project and examining the "Source File Settings" I noticed a "secret" that distrubs me a little.

I have been know to forget passwords, but I did not expect this kind of help.

Has this already been discussed when I wasn't looking? If so, I would appreciate a link to enlighten me.

I suppose i could just edit the project and delete the source distribution before sending to my customer.

At the very least "YOU have been warned!"

Ben

No, it is very hard to read. Now we are annoyed. Perhaps "annoyed" is also not a native speaker.

However, native or not, no care was taken to organize the thoughts, and no effort was made to puctuate in a manner to enhance understanding.

To the original author: at least learn to hit enter and create a paragraph every now and then. If what you write is too hard to comprehend, then not much help will be recruited.

M

I have a customer who's spec read like that...

To answer your question re:Changes

Every release of LabVIEW comes with Release Notes and Upgrade Notes. While they do NOT cover every change, they do address the biggies.

If you do not find what you need in those documents, then please post follow-up Q's regarding the specific feature and we will do our best to help.

Ben

I am not sure if this is the correct place for this post but a power user rant seems appropriate

Has anyone tried to apply a password to a hiarchy yet?

If that isn't enough...

Have you looked at the Source Code Distribution that is included in the new LV Project file produced?

Ben

(not tested in LV 8.20 )

... Personally, I don't like these solutions. ...

Same here!

The lack of visual feedback makes the user think the application is hung or not responding.

Ben

Hi, I found that if you enable the Show folding feature the error don't occur anymore :thumbup:

Dany

Download File:post-223-1157980624.vi

Yikes!

Talk about being on the horns of a dilema!

Since I generally do not auto-index While Loops I'll leeve the "Show Constant folding" off and try to remember not to auto-index on while loops.

Ben

Care to elaborate?

Just an educated guess...

"May the Schwartz be with you!"

Ben

Lets see if I can give this a little spin the other way...

Look at it from the point of view of the organization that offers the course.

Lets ignore the cost of reloading all of the machine each time the course changes and keeping all of the hardware up to date and functioning.

The NI course must be taught by CLD's or CLA's.

Concider what CLD's and CLA's would make durring the same 40 hours if they were doing project work.

With a full class room they may break even with what they would make if doing contract work.

So the cost when compare to universities may be high, in effect, its a rather fair deal.

Closing Q:

Why do you think T/A's often teach undergrad courses?

Ben

Are you talking about your custom made VIs or the ones that come with LabVIEW? If you're talking about your own VIs, the help uses the indicator label's name...

Yes the behaviour of the wires coming from my sub-VI's do that but I'd like to do it for the native LV operators.

It would make creating sub-VI's easier as well becuase if we labeled the wires BEFORE the sub-VI was created, LV would label all of our controls and indicators automatically.

Ben

Maybe you could convert your data to a variant and add the "name" as an attribute?

If I really wanted to get the name to show when floating that woudl work.

BUT my thought was to provide a mechanism to improve the documentation of the diagram w/o making it more complicated.

I can hear them asking already, "BEN, why did you convert to variant?".

What I am thinking is to take the recomended free text we use to lable shift registers and wires, and actually associate the two.

Ben

I'm not sure I understand, but are you just looking for some way to name elements in a cluster so they can be unbundled by name? If so, try "Bundle by name" with an input cluster that defines the names:

Seeing that Y'all have posted every possible correct answer to this Q, let me share what I thought the Q was by the title.

The thought occured to me that that it could be much easier to indentify wires and tunnels (for the purpose of scripting) if I could apply a label to them.

"On the surface" it would just look like improved documentation. But under the hood I'd like to be able to do an invoke node wire named tunnel to ...

It would also be nice to be able label the outputs of nodes with proper names that would be displayed when we use help and the wiring tool while over the wire.

Just a thought,

Ben

Yeah, I knew you could, but it was just too clunky for my liking.

Actually, it's more that we have one place on our UI where I plopped down a simple array control thinking that oh-so-dangerous thought: "I'll have to replace that with something more user friendly when I get the chance" ...

... now guess which item has been on my todo list close to the longest???

... and guess which part of the UI causes confusion among all of our non-LabVIEW operators???

Don't you hate it when procrastinating pays-off? :thumbup:

How do you un-learn that leason ?!

Ben

This is indeed wonderful news. We have been struggling with this (incredibly insidious and dangerous) bug for a long time, in a somewhat different form.

It seemed to rear its ugly head whenever we edited a type def with a similar structure to your example - suddenly the unbundle was unbundling 10 identical signals, not ten separate signals that happened to have the same name but were inside 10 separate sub-clusters.

This alone will likely move us to 8.20 sooner rather than later.

Jaegen

I agree and really hated this bug.

This first tim eit hit it involved a cluster where I was limiting the history data loaded for a tag. Instead of loading the data for the last 24 hours, it loadd it FROMTHE BEGINNING OF TIME because istead bundling to the "start time" it was updating the Stop Time twice leaving the start time as 1904. For an application with 500+ VI that kept data from the time it was first started, this resulted in the application taking more time to boot each time it was started.

It was only an error reported by VI Analyzer (Thank you Darren) that flaged my attention.

At that time I attributed the error to myself.

THe second time was a result of a customer calling my up after te4sting one of my changes and asking "BEN, did you even test this thing? It is displaying my RPM in the temperature field."

Ben

... that alone is worth the price of admission to me ...

I think the scroll bar was a sleeper becuase it was already possible to do that in prior versions.

See this thread (on the NI Deve-Exchange)

http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?boar...ssage.id=127096

starting at post # 17 we start talking about how to customize an array container to use a slider.

Not as easy as LV 8 but still possible.

And here is an even earlier posting by Jean-Pierre Drolet talking about the same trick.

http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?boar...uireLogin=False

Ben

I think you left out another 8.0 feature no one talks about: The Mixed-Signal graph. Does anyone use this thing?

Sigh. My work is so un-appreciated :headbang:

J

I can not say that I have used the mixed signal graph yet. Most of projects require about 1 version of LV to to pass before the authorization for funding comes through.

The good news is I have not heard about anyone bashing it.

So there is a possibility that the following quote;

"The problem with writing perfect code is,

that if it is perfect,

chances are that no one will ever see it." (BenNI)

Ben