Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Dan DeFriese @ Jan 14 2009, 03:02 PM) In LabVIEW 8.5 you can configure the Call Library node to get a path that receives the DLL to call at runtime. Before LabVIEW 8.5 you have indeed to encapsulate all calls to DLLs that might be not available into VIs that get called dynamically through VI server. You can load the VI with an Open Instrument Node and either check its execution state or directly try to call it through the Call By Reference Node. Call by Reference will return an error if the VI was not executable (which it will not be if it could not resolve a DLL call). Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (shoneill @ Jan 14 2009, 04:55 AM) I think he is either amusing himself very much here or completely beyond any help. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Antoine Châlons @ Jan 14 2009, 03:31 AM) Hmm didn't encounter that so far. I would expect the upgrade process to take care of that. It does with just about anything else with the immensely reworked File IO functions. Writing new code is of course another beast if you are used to the old default value Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (OlivierL @ Jan 13 2009, 12:16 PM) Build array can not cause a memory leak in the true sense of the word. A memory leak means really that memory got allocated and the reference got lost somehow without the memory being freed. The unlimited Build Array function is really just a memory hog meaning it will accumulate memory over and over without ever releasing it. It is not a memory leak in the sense that LabVIEW very well knows about it and will eventually release it if you unload the VI containing that huge accumulated array. QUOTE (jdunham @ Jan 8 2009, 05:52 PM) No, there are plenty of things the profiler won't report. I don't believe that shows global memory like queues and notifiers or stuff allocated by ActiveX nodes that you've invoked. Not sure about queues really. It might not track them. For memory allocated in external components like ActiveX servers or even DLLs the Profiler has no way of tracking that down really as it is not allocated under its control. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Variant @ Jan 13 2009, 06:38 AM) Can you be a bit more clear with your question? I for one still wonder what you meant by this sentence. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Maca @ Jan 13 2009, 01:43 AM) They would be violating copyright and their license if they did. And if he has an older PID Toolkit it should still work in 8.5. It used to be simply a collection of VIs in older versions with diagrams intact so 8.5 can read it without problem. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (jgcode @ Jan 9 2009, 03:02 AM) It's a Beta after all! File a bug report at MS QUOTE (Jim Kring @ Jan 12 2009, 09:37 PM) I wonder if Vista will just be like Windows ME and we can all just agree to forget about it, eventually. I think that is what will happen eventually. However I don't think they can avoid things like UAC in Windows 7 but probably implement it a bit saner so that you won't have to click several times through a password dialog to simply install a software. Windows 7 seems to be supposed to be the rigorously redesigned OS that Vista should have been, before they found out that doing that is going to take so long that they won't have a successor to XP for maybe 8 years but needed to get something out sooner as they were already way behind the 3 year release schedule for a new Windows version. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (dmpizzle @ Jan 9 2009, 04:28 PM) The LabVIEW Text Write function node has a mode selection (right click pop-up menu) called "Convert EOL". When activated the function will convert each instance of LF, CR, or LF/CR into the end of line identifier for the current platform. Each platform has its own native EOL with Mac using a CR, Unix a LF and Windows CR/LF. And I think that LabVIEW for Mac OS X still uses the CR as it is really a Carbon application despite the underlying Unix kernel. When you want to write a text with specific EOL you have to format it accordingly and disable above mentioned option in the Write Text function. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Antoine Châlons @ Jan 10 2009, 06:12 AM) Option 3 was somewhere documented in old LabVIEW days (LabVIEW 4 or 5) but it seems it got somehow lost since, although it still works. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (mattdl68 @ Jan 8 2009, 05:39 PM) This is in the installed online help of LabVIEW for quite some time at least since 8.0 although with some small modifications in each version to adapt to changes and new features of the Call Library Node configuration. LabVIEW Help Menu->Search the LabVIEW Help: Index Tab: enter call library This will eventually get you to a topic under: Fundamentals->Calling Code Written in Text Based Languages->Concepts->Calling Shared Libraries (DLLs) It is about the meaning of the options in the configuration of the Call Library Node. But it won't help you with your previous question, how to find out in which order and with what parameters to call a particular API. Of course it is actually about calling an API that is typically written in C and the whole shared library concept is based on C too, so understanding at least the basic principles of C datatypes and their handling is really a prerequisite to be able to even understand what all those options and things mean. But that is not LabVIEW's fault, other than that it does not require you to know much about those things for programming some simple LabVIEW only VIs. For complexer programming it is even in LabVIEW more or less doomed, if you do not have some good basic programming knowledge, although the more C specific things you don't really need to know unless you want to venture into the Call Library Node or God forbid the Code Interface Node. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Irene_he @ Jan 8 2009, 12:07 AM) No I think you are right. Except the person knowing 20% does not know that percentage . That person likely thinks to know almost anything he or she would need to do the task only to find out later that there was about 4 to 5 times as much to learn before they could actually succeed. The problem is that some people get discouraged half way through it and then abandon the idea. I have some of those projects too. Another quite common thing is that the last 10% of the work require 90% of the time. That is where most people stop. Rolf Kalbermatter QUOTE (mattdl68 @ Jan 7 2009, 08:44 PM) Thanks rolfk the link above will give you some history to my nightmare.......lol. What is confusing to me,is how to find the order of the dll's and functions to get what I need. There has to be some documentation out there that would give you some idea of the order in which to call functions.........one would think....lol I would think when trying to find USB devices using C++ they would need the order as well. Of course! And except from examples in the SDKs (and DDKs) and sometimes from Open Source projects you can investigate how certain things are done, that is where the creative art of programming starts. With trial and error, combinatorial logic, experience with certain types of APIs (if you have programmed WINAPI application, writing a MacOS X application can seem a really unlogical way of doing things and vice versa) and some sort of magic (I have often tinkered one or more days about how to get something to work, only to wake up one morning and having suddenly an idea that turned out to be the start of a solution), you go step by step about programming something. Programming in LabVIEW itself is not that much different but its on a much higher and more abstract level than tinkering with system APIs. And there is really no magic LabVIEW could employ to make working on system API level as easy as working on LabVIEW diagram level besides of having people like the NI elves and other third party developers write impressive intermediate level software such as DAQmx to make the work for the LabVIEW programmer more bearable. It's about the way your brain cells work and have been trained. On the same level, I've seen several brilliant system programmers cringe and falter at an attempt to produce a more than trivial LabVIEW application. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (jdunham @ Jan 7 2009, 12:45 PM) They never can be conflicting. TCP/IP mandates that at least one of these (TCP source address, TCP target address, TCP source port or TCP target port) must be different for any two connections. Otherwise the routing engine would get utterly confused. Since the listen socket (the device) uses a single address and port and the connections come from the same computer, the connection must be opened on different ports. Yes LabVIEW TCP Open Connection uses auto port selection and always uses a currently non used port for that. You can define a specific port to open but if that port is already in use TCP Open Connection will fail. And if the device allows multiple connections it will receive an individual socket for each incoming connection so it can easily determine from which source a specific command comes. If it can't handle multiple connection it will normally simply not accept new connections and the second and any further connection attempt will fail with a timeout. It could be also that the device principially does accept multiple connections but its execution engine is buggy in the sense that it can not handle multiple connections without creating a mess. This would be a design problem of the device. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Val Brown @ Jan 3 2009, 05:05 PM) Well, theoretically. In practice the Windows API is sometimes very complex and the most difficult part is that it usually pulls in a very large part of the Windows header files and some of them do contain C preprocessor defines and C language constructs where the DLL Wizard parser simply chokes on. I've been writing a C header file parser in the past using LabVIEW and it was a major pain and still is not doing as much as the DLL Wizard parser can handle. So even if the actual function you try to import is not using complicated parameters it is quite possible to fail due to the pulling in of other Windows API headers that are undigestable for the parser. And if it is using complicated parameters then it will fail a lot of times anyhow. QUOTE (mattdl68 @ Jan 3 2009, 03:38 PM) Hi Irene. Thanks for the info. I looked into doing a wrapper. But i don't Know c that well. I was trying also to use the VISA develoment wizzard. The wizzrd had errors trying to setup the setapi.dll. The VISA wizard is not about helping you call DLLs but about creating inf files for accessing VISA devices including USB devices. However for USB devices they should not be handled by an already installed or standard Windows driver as then VISA can not gain access to it. You probably meant the Shared Libary Import Wizard and here you obviously need to point it to the right header file. In the case of the SetupDi... functions this would be the SetupAPI.h. Functions not defined in there but being exported by the SetupAPI.DLL (all the CMP_ and CM_ functions in your other screen shot) will of course cause errors but should not affect the SetupDi.. functions. However it all could still fail due to unparsable constructs in the SetupAPI.h file or in other depending header files. QUOTE Correct me if i"m wrong, even using c++ you need to know thr order in which to call the functions. For example...say i want to find all devices currently connected to the USB? What is the order of doing that? i'm assuming there are some outputs of some functions that feed the inputs of other funtions. Is ther some documation for this? Yes MSDN and the Windows Platform SDK. MSDN is mostly about the function prototype and documentation and the Platform SDK (PSDK) contains both the headers and C code samples how these functions can be used. QUOTE the SetupDiGetClassDevs asked for a flag, Dword. DIGCF_ALLCLASSES is one of the fags. Is this a string? The flag ClassGuid is it a key which looks in the Ini file supplied by manufactuer. To get the device id (number) but seeing for know I what all devices connected. This should be set to null. So would I input a string constat(null) or a 0(U32) Since the flag is a DWORD it must be a integer number or bit flag. What numeric value corresponds to the Preprocessor symbol DIGCF_ALLCLASSES you can sometimes lookup in MSDN and otherwise you have to search in the headers of the PSDK for it. A GUID is a structure of 16 Bytes length as you seem to have been told already. This and anything else about datatypes can be also found on MSDN or in the headers of the PSDK. The function expects a pointer to that. If you need to pass here a NULL value you would configure it as uInt32 (or (Un)Signed Pointer-sized Integer in LabVIEW >= 8.6 which will take care about adjusting for the different pointer size if you ever move to LabVIEW for Windows 64 bit) and then pass in a 0 integer. QUOTE (Val Brown @ Jan 3 2009, 08:14 PM) It is impressive to me how frequently that Wizard simply fails. Welcome to DLL Hell. Ever written a C compiler? Try and you will understand! I admire the courage of the person not only attempting the task of creating the DLL Wizard (I've written a somewhat less exhaustive C header parser in LabVIEW for another project) but also adding it to the released version of LabVIEW. How it got past the release manager I'm not sure but that person probably had no idea about how difficult a good C parser is, so he or she believed it to work fine after being shown some successful imports from not to complicated APIs . Since it will be almost impossible to remove that tool now, it will stay there but I'm not sure there will be enough support for it once the father of this project moves on to other tasks. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Cool-LV @ Jan 5 2009, 07:54 PM) You can get that lib from the aformentioned code capture tool. The clipboard library is only a utility to the bitmap library functionality so said example should actually have been put in the bitmap lib instead of into the clipboard lib. Ahh well, if everything would be perfect! But then it comes for free, doesn't it? Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Cool-LV @ Jan 5 2009, 03:51 AM) Here is the clipbrd.llb file from the Code Capture Tool enhanced with three functions to handle CF_HDROP. LabVIEW 6.0 format http://lavag.org/old_files/post-349-1231192068.llb'>Download File:post-349-1231192068.llb Rolf Kalbermatter

This is a crosspost from http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?boar...ding&page=5. We finally did a definite release of the OpenG LVZlib library. There are no real changes to the library itself apart from some documentation updates and cosmetic changes but it is now official. For a more detailed list of changes in this new version relative to 2.3 you can refer to http://wiki.openg.org/Oglib_lvzip-2.4 The Windows, Linux and MacOS X version are all updated and seem to work just fine. Sorry for the Mac Classic guys but I saw no opportunity to recompile for Mac Classic targets yet and we do probably not intend to build for that target anymore unless there is some real demand. While support for VxWorks has been added it has not been tested on VxWorks targets yet as I still haven't one available to play with. The OpenG package can be downloaded here and is best installed using VIPM. For VxWorks support you should ftp the according lvzlib.out to the controller into ni-rt\system, from the correct subdirectory (vxWorks82 for LabVIEW 8.2.x and vxWorks85 for LabVIEW 8.5.x and 8.6) inside the lvzip directory created where you installed the package. As already mentioned this should now work for following targets: Windows, Pharlap RT targets lvzlib.dll VxWorks RT targets lvzlib.out Linux targets lvzlib.so MacOS X lvzlib.framework Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (lenny wintfeld @ Dec 29 2008, 04:53 PM) Basically it is meant as a library of template icons. You select the icon of your choice, then go to Edit->Copy or press Ctrl-C, then go to the icon editor for your own VI where you want to use this icon as a base and in there you make a Ctrl-V or Edit->Paste. Now you can start to customize your icon the way you want it such as adding the Instrument Prefix. The Icon256.vi in itself has absolutely no runtime operation at all and is not meant to have one either. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Tomi Maila @ Dec 29 2008, 05:50 AM) Only if Windows or whatever OS you are using is adding that leap second in its time base. Question is: will they do so or just silently ignore the leap second? Edit: According to http://www.meinberg.de/english/info/leap-second.htm at least Windows will not do leap seconds correction on its own. Of course if you do time synchronization you will see the effect anyhow, however if you do that your application should be prepared to deal with incontinueties in the returned time anyhow since the synchronization can cause jumps of more than one second whenever it happens. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (malani @ Dec 29 2008, 08:06 AM) What is inefficient about that? It's exactly how the Substitute copy for Original is implemented only without the delete afterwards as the original file remains on disk. You do need to think about feelings you have. Just because something does feel inefficient does not mean it has to be so. If it works and does what you want, why going to try to make a supergalactic solution instead? Not even a NASA budget could help you there Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (vugie @ Nov 17 2008, 05:42 PM) You didn't search good enough. It is documented in a few posts at least on forums.ni.com but probably even here, and quite a few times on old Info-LabVIEW although that may be a bit harder to search nowadays. It is an issue as far back as I can remember (LabVIEW 3.x or so). Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (romeo @ Dec 22 2008, 11:39 AM) A common problem and you will find many links here and on forums.ni.com describing that. The reason is that the image inside the ActiveX control is not controllerd by LabVIEW but by the ActiveX control. Simply put there is no simple way for LabVIEW to tell the ActiveX control to render itself into an offscreen context so that that context can be turned into an image and then send over the web. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (carlover @ Dec 24 2008, 06:18 PM) Well there always is but I doubt you want to go to that length. It would probabply mean to call the JPEG (or whatever format you have) DLL directly with two memory buffers to decompress from and into and then using the IMAQ GetImagePixelPtr function to directly copy the entire decompressed buffer properly into the IMAQ image. All this would be best done in an external code function written in C. You can of course also use the IMAQ ArrayToImage function instead so you have not to worry about getting the correct memory offsets into the pointer but that function is considerably slower. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (neB @ Nov 18 2008, 09:37 AM) Ohhh! I should probably look by more frequently . Only just now happened to see this. Thanks Ben and everybody else. I guess I moderated my appearance a bit lately. Seems like kids have that effect. But there are a lot others who are doing a better job than I could ever do in many of the more modern topics such as *OOP. I'll probably continue to contribute to some extend but the times where I could post daily are definitely gone. Happy Christmas and a happy new year to everybody and keep the wirework up! Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (xavier30 @ Dec 18 2008, 08:49 AM) I can't help you with that. Makefile creation is a rather tricky business even if you only want to target one OS. Cross platform is simply beyond my knowledge. The way I do it is using MS VC .dsw project files for Windows, simple Makefile for Linux, Xcode project file for Macintosh and last but not least a modified Unix Makefile.vxworks for VxWorks creation. Trying to figure out the perfect settings and everything to create a cross platform Makefile is a noble desire but I have better things to do with my time ;-) Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Wedge @ Dec 24 2008, 01:49 PM) Your XyzWpr class is probably not instantiable through a class factory of your DLL but instead only available as subclass of the main object hierarchy. Try to connect a property node to the CurPosition property of the main instance instead for instance. It could be likely the same class (big guess from my side though) and see what you get there. In order to be able to instantiate classes as top level classes they need to be supported by the class factory of the automation server (your ActiveX DLL). For many subclasses that makes little or no sense since they are only meaningful in the context of a higher class. Rolf Kalbermatter