Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (eaolson @ May 19 2008, 02:19 PM) I'm not sure where you read about atheism being a religion in the post you replied to. I read about it being a belief and I have to agree with that. Nobody can proof there is a deity nor that there isn't, so even atheists believe in something Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Yen @ May 19 2008, 01:12 PM) Indeed. LabVIEW here only checks the OS error after doing socket calls and translates that error into it's own error number. And it was decided that a more granular error reporting is the good thing to do and I agree with it. Another angle might be that the OP is not really interested into the actual connection at all but rather into the information if the network node is reachable at all. This is solved easily with a network ping as described in following http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=170&thread.id=70801&view=by_date_ascending&page=1' target="_blank">link. I include a copy of the fixed version of that library. There is however one principal problem with LabVIEW's multithreading and the error reporting as done with sockets: The WSA error is maintained on a thread specific global variable and for the blocking call when waiting on an answer from the remote node and in case of parallel execution of this utility in general this causes a small issue. So for this select call the reported error in case of a failure never will be the real error since the select call happens in one of the threads inside a multi threaded execution systems while the error retrieval will occur in the UI thread. Also if you run multiple ping calls in parallel, the error from one call may get overwritten by the execution of another call before the first VI had a chance to retrieve it's associated error. The only real fix for this would be to write a wrapper DLL that does the actual socket call and error retrieval together in one function per different socket call (since the actual call to an external code routine is guranteed by LabVIEW to be atomic in terms of the actual calling thread inside LabVIEW. I would like to add that the VIs are LabVIEW 7.0 and the original code is from m3nth on the NI forums. Rolf Kalbermatter

I've got a Dell Latitude D830 with 15.4" display and generally like it. In the office I use a docking station and an external 22"wide screen display too. Don't have to do lot of work on the road but I do use the laptop only mode at home and find it quite workable with this 15 inch screen. But I chose on purpose for a low 100 dpi instead of the maximum available 148 dpi because I hate those super tiny fonts and even more the Windows hack of Big fonts to work around that and it also matches the resolution of normal desktop LCD monitors of 90 dpi better. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (gmart @ May 16 2008, 04:44 PM) Well it's not about for example Visual Studio or not but about if that IDE uses the SCC API. That API was specifically designed around the strict check in/check out philosophy and accordingly uses, enforces and even requires it. And that does not work well with SVN. Visual Studio certainly is not a very good IDE to use with SVN since it does really on the SCC API for its Source Code Control integration. As others have said there are other IDEs that are a lot more flexible in how they interface to SCC systems and that work a lot better with SVN than Visual Studio. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (mkaravitis @ May 16 2008, 04:56 PM) Callback functionality is not supported byt the Call Library Node. The most simple solution is to write a wrapper DLL in C that provides that callback function translating the callback event into a LabVIEW occurrence or LabVIEw user event and a LabVIEW callable function to install that callback function. All in all not something you are likely to solve without some good C programming knowledge. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Michael_Aivaliotis @ May 16 2008, 01:10 PM) My thinking exactly. However quite some of those manufacturers compete with NI mainly on one base and that is being cheaper than NI so I guess that leaves not much space to spend money for real software development especially since NI hardware has been getting more competitive in price too in the last years. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Tomi Maila @ May 16 2008, 12:37 PM) I'm still not sure I can see the need for ms and frame accuracy on playback. However what we did so far was synchronization and combined storage of video and data acquisition http://www.citengineering.com/pagesEN/products/sdvd.aspx' rel='nofollow' target="_blank">Synchronized Video & Data Acquisition Device in order to have time accurate life measurements such as blood pressure, ECG and similar together with the actual video recoding of the operation so that these things can later be exactly localized in relation to the actual action taken at that moment. However playback of this video together with the data is usually not really in real time and definitly not in strict realtime as the researcher normally wants to go through the interesting sections in real slow motion. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Tomi Maila @ May 15 2008, 10:22 AM) Er! The big question here is for what is this good? The human eye has a very limited time resolution so what is it that makes you or your customer believe that the actual display of every single frame to a very accurate time position is so important and not just the overal speed of the movie to the original timeline? Basically Windows is not real time and any other desktop OS neither. So they are more or less inherently unable to guarantee a whole video frame being transmitted every 40ms (25 frames per second) accurately to a time scale of only a few ms. So any normal video playing software just simply synchronizes the video stream timeline continously to the actual time, skipping frames whenever appropriate. On lower level (for instance when you control the Quicktime API directly but DirectX/Direct Play surely has similar capabilities) you can opt for frame accurate display instead of time accurate display but that usually means that the timeline of the playback is not synchronized with the original timeline anymore as it sooner or later starts to have a time lag. I do not see any way to guarantee both frame and time accurate display of movie material on non-dedicated hardware other than simply buying the greatest and highest performance hardware components, installing a hardware video decompressor that supports your video compression and preferably has a direct link (crosswire or dedicated PCIe channel) and the meanest and leanest OS you can possible get your hands on and keep your hands crossed that no system interrupts such as network traffic or other DMA transfers will mess up your timing anyhow. Now with dedicated hardware such as embedded systems with specially optimized RT OSes for media solutions this might be a different story. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (marp84 @ May 16 2008, 03:41 AM) You need the Professional Version of LabVIEW or the Application Builder add-on in order to do that. Then read the User Manual about how to go about creating an executable. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Gary Rubin @ May 15 2008, 10:48 AM) Now you are exagerating a bit . I mean I've seen those "drivers" and they usually come from companies producing some hardware and wanting to make it available to LabVIEW users but they do not have a professional LabVIEW programmer and sometimes even just use the evaluation version of LabVIEW to create their drivers. It's in general a very bad idea to do since the technical support requests those companies create in such a way is huge and they have obviously no resources to support that. Which depending on the customer means: he is writing his own driver or abandones LabVIEW or the hardware in favor of a different product -> both cases result in a dissatisfied customer. Now I do write VI libraries too and develop "drivers" regularly. Some of them are openly available, some even free and I would hope that those libraries/drivers would not fall under your category of poorly written "LabVIEW SDKs". They definitly almost never use sequences and if they do it is for data dependency only and nothing else. That there are people that want to still rewrite them may be true but I would like to think that that has more to do with the "Not invented here" syndrome than anything else and I have to admit that I have been going down that path at times in the past too. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (tengels @ May 14 2008, 07:52 AM) What is the serial interface? A USB to Serial converter? If so it may be a problem in its driver which VISA does not know how to deal with properly. I've seen strange behaviour with several USB to Serial adpaters in the past. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (crelf @ May 14 2008, 01:41 PM) Never saw the white so far and for the Call Library Node it wouldn't make sense anyhow. LabVIEW can not determine if an external shared library or particular functions in it are reentrant safe. The programmer defines that in the Call Library configuration dialog (and if he says it is reentrant the according function better is or you are in for strange to rather nasty effects). RolfKalbermatter

QUOTE (Michael_Aivaliotis @ May 15 2008, 03:12 AM) What is best and what not is very discutable. LVOOP is most probably not such a bad thing but such a driver restricts its use to applications that can and will use LVOOP. Also just as with normal VI libraries the usefullness and ease of use depends greatly on the person implementing that class. You can make a mess with (LV)OOP just as easily as with normal VI library interfaces and in fact even easier since you need to understand OOP fairly well to really deliver easily reusable class implementations. I'm sure this is biased by experiences with some C++ code which can be sometimes called horrible to understand at best but it's nevertheless a real experience and is also a result of my mind which likes visual representation very much but has much more affinity with a functional interface than with some of the more complex OOP design patterns. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (BrokenArrow @ May 13 2008, 01:41 PM) Not sure about shared variables but TCP can be made fast in LabVIEW. And you do not even need to go on raw socket level. Just get a small VI from the NI site to disable the Nagle algorithme for a TCP network refnum and you are done without delays for small data packets making command-acknowledge type protocols getting slow. As to being compiled, as far as LabVIEW is concerned there should be little difference between development system and runtime system performance. If there is a big improvement the application builder would have to do something on the SV engine level that would be very spooky at best. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Gary Rubin @ May 13 2008, 01:56 PM) I don't think you can draw the line that strictly. Very strictly speaking the device driver is nowadays the piece of software that translates user application level requests into hardware specific cammands and address accesses. And that piece has to reside inside the kernel as kernel mode device driver since that is the only way to directly access hardware in nowadays protected mode OSes. However talking to that kernel device driver directly is tedious at best so they usually come with a DLL that provides an easier to use API and can be considered part of the driver as well. But with that I do not see any reason to exclude the LabVIEW VIs that access that API as being part of the driver either. After all they translate the not so easy to use DLL calls into something that can be used much more easily in LabVIEW. And once you are there why not qualify any collection of VIs that translates access to some form of hardware in something more LabVIEW friendly as a driver too? I wouldn't go as far as calling VIs to access the normal OS API as drivers though, but that is an entirely arbitrary and subjective classification on my part. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (maak @ May 12 2008, 02:29 AM) It's good practice to always use brackets around table names and column identifiers. This will not only catch reserved words but also identifiers that have embedded spaces, which for SQL is a syntax separator otherwise. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Ami @ May 12 2008, 04:00 AM) You are likely running into threading limitations. LabVIEW allocates by default 4 threads per execution system and for version 8.5 per CPU core and when executing external code that suspends execution the calling thread is blocked until the external code returns. As long as you stay in LabVIEW altogether LabVIEW will attempt to schedule multiple code sequences to run in parallel even if the 4 threads do not satisfy the need of LabVIEW directly but once in external code LabVIEW has no way of gaining control back from that thread to keep your program working among multiple external calls. Solution would be to avoid blocking calls to external code altogether, or disperse the different calls into different subVIs and assign them to different execution systems, or increase the number of allocated threads to your execution system in threadconfig.vi. These recommendations are in declining order of receommendation as they will be more complicated to setup and maintain in the long run and the last one will eventually burdon the system with a load that may bring it to a halt. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (BrokenArrow @ May 9 2008, 12:59 PM) Flush Buffer will delate data already in either the receive or transmit buffer. Discard Event will discard any events that might have already been queued for the current refnum. That are two very different things. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (kawait @ May 9 2008, 05:04 AM) Unfortunately this does not specify the calling convention! You would need something like __stdcall in those two declarations too. If you are using Visual C however you are most likely using stdcall already since this is the default calling convention used by 32Bit Microsoft C compilers. To be sure check in the compile conficuration for your project or files what the default calling convention is. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (netta @ May 8 2008, 12:59 PM) I usually do this by creating a Top Level.vi and putting in whatever dynamic VIs I have. Masscompile won't help since LabVIEW unloads VIs during masscompile as soon as they are not used anymore. The project doesn't help either because the VIs in a project are not yet loaded. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Gavin Burnell @ May 7 2008, 06:00 PM) A question of tweaking and benchmarking by the LabVIEW developer team. The general reasoning is like this: A too small value will limit the ability of LabVIEW to offload some of the thread management to the OS. A to high value will cause performance degradation due to increased management overhead by the OS. So 4 is probably a good compromise in allowing LabVIEW to map several code "clumps" directly to OS threads without having to schedule code clumps to much itself and the extra overhead the OS will have in managing multiple threads effectively. In terms of number of allocated threads per process LabVIEW is really one of the heavier heavy weights of most typical applications. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (netta @ May 6 2008, 08:51 AM) It uses whatever the OS is able to provide and does not know the difference of physical memory or virtual memory at all since that is managed all by the OS. However there is a default limit of 2GB memory per process for all 32 bit OSes independant of the actual physical memory available. Most OSes can be switched with an option to allow the OS to give an application up to 3GB of memory but for more you do need true 64 bit OS and application support. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (kawait @ May 6 2008, 10:05 PM) Well you always have to allocate the space in the caller for C type pointers. Nothing wrong with that. In principle there is also no difference in passing a byte array or a string. Memory wise they are the same. But the way you do it now you will receive a byte array from the dll that is exactly 100 bytes long independant of how many characters the DLL filled in. The Byte Array to String function will not change anything about that so you always end up with a string of 100 characters with the desired characters in the beginning and NULL characters in the rest of the string. The Call library Node does however have special treatment for parameters that are configured to be C style string pointers. On return LabVIEW will scan the string and search for the terminating NULL character and then resize the string to only be of that size. So by moving the Byte Array to String function before the Call Library Node you do both allocate the size of it (it's a lot easier to allocate a Byte Array using Initialize Array than putting a string constant on the diagram that contains the necessary amount of spaces or whatever) and on return you actually already get the string properly resized to the real string. Please note that this resizing will only shrink the string buffer. You do need to make sure that you pass in an array that is positively and under any circumstances big enough to receive the actual string. QUOTE BTW, after I made my post here, I seemed to find out some big mistake. The explicitly call the cleanup function in my VI seemed the one which causes trouble. After I have removed the explicit call to the cleanup function my VI doesn't crash at all after almost 10 run cycles (I cant say that it wont crach though). I know it is just because I have done the cleanup of some resource too early in my DLL cleanup function and I will take further look to that. That is the difficulty! No crash does not mean it is already working perfect. It may still just destroy non-vital data that could only show up as crash when you end LabVIEW, since it tries to dealocate resources you happen to have destroyed or it may be as subtle as only visual or non-visual corruptions to your actual VIs that may trigger many days later. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (xinbadaz @ May 6 2008, 01:47 AM) This is a bug in the type library for above Active X component. That typelibrary contains a directory entry that points to the same directory as the type library itself but the help file name in there is only the file name itself and no subdirectory. It's not a LabVIEW fault at all since LabVIEW should not have to worry about the language ID of help files and accordingly not have to search in subdirectories of the expected location for that file but the typelibrary should point at the right locations directly. As to how to let LabVIEW know how to find the help file there is not so much you can do since editing the typelibrary is not really an option. I would just copy said help file to where the typelibrary says it is and be done with it or upgrade to a newer office version if I would use Excel over Active X at all. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (kawait @ May 5 2008, 09:17 PM) Lot's of questions and little hard facts to check and look at. A few comments though: 1) What I usually do is having one or more exported function to allocate resources (my DLL typically can handle multiple connections/resources) and also according functions to release those resources. All resources are also stored in a global list and on DLL_PROCESS_DETACH I check this list and deallocate anything that might still be in there. I normally never do resource allocations in DLL_ROCESS_ATTACH but instead make sure that the functions do check and if necessary allocate whatever they need at runtime only. 2) If you are positive that the types are compatible it really doesn't matter. Those nice extcode.h datatypes are for clarity for the programmer and to allow LabVIEW to define them to whatever a specific compiler may need to but in nowadays 32bit only world these are fairly consistent across compilers and plattforms. 3) Not really clear to me. But of course for parameters that need to return something to the caller you always need to pass them by reference (as pointer). You can also convert the Byte Array to a string and pass it as C string pointer directly. This has the added bonus that LabVIEW will search for the NULL terminating character on return and pass only the valid part of the string further. Never ever use DSNewPtr or any of the other *Ptr memory manager functions for DLL functions parameters that are passed from LabVIEW or returned to LabVIEW. Those parameters are either skalars, C pointers or LabVIEW data handles. For skalars there is nothing special, for pointers they have to be allocated in the caller (e.g. Initialize Array). The only parameters passed from and to LabVIEW that can be modified in terms of memory allocation are handles and for that you will need the according handle functions of the memory manager. Although for most cases I really would recommend to use NumericArrayResize whenever possible. 4) No! LabVIEW is definitly not more or less stable in calling external code routines in just about any version since 5.x or so. What you see is that in an executable the memory layout of your application is of course different so when your wrongly configured function parameters or your wrapper DLL happen to step on invalid memory (invalid in the sense that they shouldn't try to write to it nor even access it at all) they will overwrite sometimes vital LabVIEW runtime data and sometimes just some LabVIEW edit data. If overwriting LabVIEW runtime data, this sooner or later will cause big trouble. It could crash as early as when doing the writing or as late as when exiting the application since LabVIEW tries to deallocate resources that have been invalidated by the overwriting. Overwriting LabVIEW edit data or such will possibly only be detected when you happen to open for instance a front panel or diagram and try to do some modifications. It could be just some strange text somewhere or weird attributes of objects or LabVIEW could be tripping then over the non-sensical data and go belly up at that point. Rolf Kalbermatter