peteski

Conditional Breakpoints My all time favorite debugging trick is setting "conditional breakpoints." In the pre-labview 7 days, I would put a case structure and set at least one of the cases with a breakpoint, and the other(s) without. This is good for capturing a complex setup in a "snapshot" when suspect value(s) slip down the pipeline. In a simple case, let's say a double precision number turns up with a "NaN" value, you could test for the "NaN", and if true, execute the true condition of a case statement which holds nothing but a breakpoint - unless, of course, you want something in the case statement beside the breakpoint. In Labview 7.1.1, it appears that in the custom probes there is a "conditional * probe" (* = datatype probed) which does the same thing, although I would say that the nice thing about the previous example is that rather complex conditions can be selectively probed quite easily, the hard part being *knowing* the complex condition you want to probe. Of course, True Labview Zen Masters would NEVER need probes, breakpoints, or debugging now, would they... -Pete Liiva

Hello Folks! Seems a quiescent enough spot for my first post to this forum. I first started using Labview in 1991, at my first job out of grad school working at Texaco's Beacon, NY research facility. I used it for a variety of data acquisition and data analysis tasks throughout my 8 years of doing combustion and engine research there. In 1999 I found a job as a contract engineer at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, helping to setup the ground test equipment for the GLAS instrument on ICESat. After ICESat launched in Jan 2003, I switched contracting companies to work for Sigma Space Corporation, but still do most of my work at NASA GSFC for the Laboratory of Laser Remote Sensing. I do a variety of quick and dirty R&D Lab setups, and some (almost sophisticated) analysis of engineering data from the GLAS orbital telemetry. My latest projects are setup of the ground test equipment for the LOLA (Lunar Orbital Laser Altimeter) instrument on LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter), and some (very) basic pseudo-random code laser altimetry modelling. -Pete Liiva