xtal

I'm in!! Can't wait to see y'all again!

I've got one, too!

I vilify Clean Up Diagram because it deserves it. How do you "improperly use" a button? There was nothing even remotely "clean" in what it produced; I can't imagine ANY LV programmer wanting their code to look like that. If someone hit Delete, then the *situation* would suck because that's what Delete is supposed to do and you might have clicked it when you didn't mean to. As it stands, I think the Cleanup feature sucks because it doesn't do what it is supposed to.

We did after it was all "fixed" but we were heavily in trouble-shooting mode at the time and all available USB drives were occupied with ESTOP, joysticks, and such. We had no idea the kid was gonna modify our code like that. I wasn't even there since there wasn't room in the pit and I needed to talk to the NI folks about some cRIO things. It would be so much easier if I could just disable that button like I can the Abort and Continuous Run ones. Why is that so unreasonable?

We can disable/hide the Abort button and turn off debugging. I don't see why it's an unreasonable request. For those who are suggesting SCC, you are completely missing the point. The drive computer is a bare-bones system that communicates with the robot during a competition. It's not the development machine/environment. We only change the code between matches based on how the robot performs. We use SolidWorks to model and design the robot, too, but we certainly can't put it on the drive computer, either.

I've looked around but it appears I can't turn off/hide/diasable the Clean Up Diagram button in my LabVIEW environment. Why I want to do this is a huge rant, so ignore the rest of this post if you don't want to hear anything negative on a lovely Friday. As many of you know, I am the mentor of a FIRST Robotics team and we went to the World Championship last week. The programmer for our team, Tomas, learned all his LabVIEW from me, so he codes exactly like I do. I'm an old-school LabVIEW developer from long before there was an Undo and I've developed many habits and a particular style over the years. I don't think any of my style points are terribly wrong or bad; heck, I even helped develop and maintain the LabVIEW Style Guide used internally when I was on the LV development team. I like to have minimal wire bends, I like similar items aligned and distributed, I line items up by either the Error terminals or by like refnums. Structures are similar sizes and at most my diagrams need only be scrolled in one direction. I don't hide wires or nodes behind each other or shrink structures to hide things nor do I make structures larger than they need to be. At the competition, we had some technical difficulties and in the spirit of coopertition, the programmers from other teams came by to help. It was all well and good until one kid hit the Clean Up Diagram and immediately saved the code. I've never see such a mess of technicolor spaghetti in my life! Tomas can no longer read his own code, so he can't make the changes to the program for our last matchs. I can't read his code, we are both frustrated ... and then it gets WORSE! We found a quiet place and try to fix the mess. Except that after every 3-4 edits like wire moves, structure resizes, etc, LabVIEW crashes with drawmgr.c messages. It was the most horrible LabVIEW experience I've ever had. I NEVER say anything bad about LabVIEW; I've even defended the poor misunderstood Express VIs...I'm still trying to make Shared Variables work...I will only program in LabVIEW. But I have nothing good to say about this "Clean Up Diagram" feature. I will never use it and I don't want it available on any LV development system I have to touch. I want to punch someone in the face for making a feature that makes kids cry and vow never to use LabVIEW again. {Okay, Tomas didn't actually cry, but I've never seen him so upset and he doesn't want to use LabVIEW ever again.} I now understand why that "I Hate LabVIEW" site exists. I'm almost ready to join it. This has been bugging me for a week now and I'm glad I finally got to vent. For those who read this far, thanks for listening.

Hey, Paul I've been working with high school students and while they are complete novices at programming, they take to LabVIEW very easily. We don't do OOP but we have been programming cRIOs to make robots. Let me know if you want me to invite you (and others at Lowell) to any of their events. Keep an eye out for the CocoNuts (Coconino High School's Robotics group) and FIRST. I've been mentoring them for 2 years now and absolutely love it!

Darn! We are going to miss you, Cat. I'll be there as always.

When you work in a regulated environment, updating SW from 8.6 to 8.6.1 is considered a pretty major change requiring all sorts of revalidation. I'm fine with LV updating often and fixing things on a yearly cycle, but don't expect me to jump on board for each new rev the second it releases. Most of my projects are still in 8.2.1 and 8.6.1. Yes, I'm falling way behind on the "new features" curve, but it sure beats having to revalidate dozens of machines.

It works fine for me right now.

Neither, I'll wear Teva sandals like always (no socks) because I'm the weird hippy chick from Flagstaff.

If in doubt, right-click on the object you want to modify.

Hang in there, Cat! I hope things continue to go smoothly. Next NIWeek we can talk back surgery over a margarita or five.

Thanks! I forwarded the link to my FRC team. One of our own is in the movie at 0:50 - she'll get a kick out of that.

I second Cat's nomination of Mark for LV Saint.