Rolf Kalbermatter

I noticed this happening to all image attachments on LAVA lately. Must be a misconfiguration on the IP-Board software and I guess someone should alert Micheal about this.

Well I'm not sure if XNodes can be grown manually, but I do know that the Build Array node is NOT an XNode. It's a native node and is directly implemented in C inside LabVIEW.

Most likely this is because of the name decoration Visual C uses by default for WINAPI functions. Those functions have in fact by default (but it can be suppressed) an @n appended where n is the number of bytes the function takes on the stack for parameters. LabVIEW has been smart enough to accept undecorated function names(just as it also accepts prepended underscores which is the default name decoration for cdecl functions) and map them to the according decorated name for ages. Apparently they added in 8.6 the smartiness to use WINAPI automatically when the function has this decoration. I guess it can byte your ass as you have found out, but it is not a bad improvement. Of course the backsave feature would be even better if it knew this smartness too, but I have a feeling, that may not have been foreseen in the backsave feature, so it may not even be possible without a lot of extra work.

I haven't tried this but would strongly guess, that this is really just a Windows feature and by coincidence rather than by design. If it was designed that way they certainly would have made it more user friendly.

sorry I'm working on my network library to allow clients to communicate with them over SSL before starting to work on them themselves .

I have also gone the path of (very simple) LabVIEW installers. It works quite nice and when I did it in LabVIEW 7.1 I even could make it self contained by only copying a handful of LabVIEW runtime files into the same folder as the executable itself, so that it would work even with no LabVIEW runtime installed. Doing the same in newer LabVIEW versions gets however increasingly difficult and having to run an installer first for the LabVIEW runtime to be able to run an installer then for your application is not a good option . Another application I have worked with is InnoSetup. Advantages: Free, powerful, fully scriptable. Disadvantage: if you need to do anything non standard you have to write a script in a Pascal like language.

Very nice! You've found the menu to startup the custom menu editor. Now you just need to edit your menu the way you want it and implement some event handling in your VI for the menu. For the latter there are specific examples that you can easily locate using the built in LabVIEW example finder.

I can't really help much here, but from the little I know of this, NFS may actually play a major part in it. Never had to deal with NFS myself, luckily. If you can change the server side to use a different NFS implementation, that would be at least a start. But it might be the local software that plays up. Solaris had certainly it's very special quirks in many ways. Are you locked into using NFS or accessing everything over a network share at all? Could a local storage device not work? Unfortunately Sparcs won't have an USB Bus where you could simply plugin an external harddrive.

By creating and installing your own custom menu and implementing the according menu handling in your event structure.

That's why I leave the system settings alone. If you know what to expect as numeric format when you get some numeric strings from somewhere, program in LabVIEW explicitly to that format instead of relying on the right system settings (which as you have found out can suddenly change without you knowing). When you know it is system dependent, as basically anything that comes from Microsoft is, and any programmer relying on MS libraries somehow, then do so in LabVIEW too. If you don't know, do a good guess which probably will be most times to be platform format. Last but not least when you write files that are meant for your application only, always write them in a fixed format (either always decimal point or always comma) unless the customer specifically asks otherwise. That way you can exchange data files between different installations of your application without having to worry about system settings either.

The refnum is clearly disposed of and also disposes of the object. The refnum can then be reused for a different resource since its numeric value is really a 16 bit magic identifier and a 16 bit index into an array of resource pointers.

I actually leave the global system setting in LabVIEW alone and program on LabVIEW function level explicitly. If you know an instrument will send decimal point then set the scan from string and format into string to explicitly use that format instead of relaying on the user to have his system setup accordingly. Because if you work with multiple instruments and systems at the same time you will be switching the settings back and forth continuously. If you operate on user data, such as files coming from the system let it work by default with the system settings, because most applications having created that file will also use that setting. Of course if you get input from files or such from a different system all bets are off, and you will need to define a certain standard. You also can make the parser smart but that only works so far and gives sooner or later ambiguous results.

I have in the past few months steadily worked on a network library for LabVIEW with following features: - Be as close as possible to the functionality, operation and semantics of the built in LabVIEW library - Support IPv6 operation - Support SSL encryption - Support ping operation right in LabVIEW (through use of raw sockets) - and of course be better than the built in functions The included library does most of these things already but will need some more work over the next few months to fully have all these features. As such it is clearly in a preliminary state and not yet ready for released software. Please be adviced that this library will cease to operate after end of June because I expect to have new releases out there before that time. In spite of the preliminary state it does work and does do already quite a few things and it even implements the LabVIEW TCP read modes exactly as the native functions. I have included an OpenG package of the library. To install it you best use the VIPM application from JKI Software as it will take care to place everything where it should be. Due to some features I'm using it will be necessary to restart LabVIEW after installation of this library in order for the library to work properly. When installed you should see a new ESI-CIT logo in the main function palette and in there a network icon. In that network palette are all the new and exciting functions. The functions have for a large part already some online help information inside, which you can see by opening the floating help and hovering over the icons or front panel control elements. I'm working on an online help file to install along with the library but it is not yet finished. This help will also outline some of the more low level operations which at the moment may appear a bit obscure. This release is only for Windows 32 Bit systems. Sorry to the Linux and Macintosh users but porting such a library is a true pain in the a** and especially for the Macintosh I'm not yet sure how to go about it, as there are several ways to skin that cat The library will work in LabVIEW 7.1 and newer versions. readme.txt citlib_lvNetCon-0.9-1.ogp

It doesn't other than you implement it. For LabVIEW a service is just another process so to access a service you have to provide a means of interapplication communication such as TCP/IP, shared memory, even DCOM, or whatever else you can come up with. My preference is clearly TCP/IP as it is the most platform independant interapplication communication channel I know of and also has the benefit of inherent remote access ability without compilicated RPC setup and initialization. Actually you are probably misunderstanding something here. LabVIEW does not do reference counting on refnums based on VIs storing such a refnum. It couldn't really do that anyhow since a refnum is just a number that can be stored in many different formats that do not necessarily have to be refnums at some point. LabVIEW disposes a refnum as soon as the top level VI in whose hierarchy the refnum was "created" goes idle, independant how many times you stored that refnum in global VIs, global variables, locals, shift registers or whatever.

WinXP has a lot more support for USB devices on board. First it comes with drivers for most USB controller chips out there. Second it supports at least HID, COMM, Still Image, PTP, Mass Storage and Printer USB class devices out of the box. Does it come with everything? Of course not because USB allows to define new classes as any manufacturer wishes and if you register them with the USB consortium they are even official standards eventhough nobody but you may using them.

The Open VI Reference function is a very bad function to call in a tight loop. Don't do that ever as it needs to execute in the UI thread and will slow down your loop tremendously.

Are you using the LabVIEW DOM library from the Internet Toolkit or simply accessing an XML ActiveX interface? In both cases you may be running into LabVIEWs automatic garbage collection for refnums. Once the top level VI in whose hierarchy a refnum was created goes idle (stops executing) LabVIEW will automatically dispose of that refnum (and the objects they reference). I'm not familiar with X controls nor how they work but if your XControl creates the refnum in some initialization state that goes idle afterwards the object goes invalid at the moment your initialization stops. How to solve that? Initilize the object in a context that will stay running for the desired lifetime of your object.

You should be able to do that with some FPGA logic and last time I searched on the NI board they did actually already have a sample project or two which implemented I2C on FPGA and in RT software and I believe even based on a DAQmx interface. So many options to pick from without needing to reinvent the wheel.

Yes, and your PCMCIA-USB comes with drivers that install a raw USB driver in the system (because Windows 95 certainly didn't have USB support on board, it was an addition to the Win95 OEM SR2 that was rather unstandardized). Raw USB is just that, raw. many different USB devices have many different requirements and therefore there exist many different USB device classes, such as mass storage devices, human interface devices, still image capture, printers, serial communication devices etc. Each of them has a different protocol on top of the USB bus and therefore needs different drivers to allow Windows or any OS to do something with them. Your PCMCIA driver CD likely will install a USB mass storage device driver that makes such devices available to Windows as volumes. It most likely also comes with a human interface device driver, that allows mice and keyboards to be recognized by Windows. It may not come with an USB communication device driver, which would be needed to make a USB COMM class device appear as an additional RS-232 port in your computer. And it will most likely not come with more specialized drivers such as still image class devices or printers or network devices. All that said it will be very difficult nowadays to find a PCMCIA-USB interface and even more difficult to find one that still supports Windows 98 or even worse Windows 95 since Windows 95 had no USB support in any of its standard releases.

As mentioned earlier you can adapt LabVIEW Embedded SDK to just about any 32 Bit platform but it will in most cases not just be an install and run experience. New supported targets are of course always nice but someone has to do them, and NI can't do them all nor will they do any if they do not see some potential market. But there is a catch 22 problem here. The cheap targets are usually used for mass production and there hardware components matter down to the penny. LabVIEW generated code is not exactly lightweight so you do need some minimal amount of memory to even be able to download a simple solution. Those targets supporting more memory are usually not the low cost hardware systems. Also low cost is used for high volume hardware usually and those developing for such a market may often exchange the ease of development with LabVIEW with the memory efficiency of a native C program to save a few more pennies in hardware costs. If they go for an expensive development system they usually go for one of the specific commercial embedded development systems and the hobbiest will go with a gcc based toolchain anyhow.

That is really not so easy. An icon consists in fact of up to four resources namely an icongroup resource, and an icon resource for each of the 3 possible bit depths 1, 4, and 8 bits. For the principle you best check an old Inside Macintosh Volume since LabVIEW binary files are more or less Macintosh OS 9 type resource files, with some minor modifications and of course many non Macintosh type resources in them. But since LabVIEW version 8.2 there is a private application method to extract the icon of a VI without loading it. Get VI Icon.vi

If you already have an analogue output you could simply do the entire function generator in LabVIEW software and output the desired signal through that output.

Because with the USB interface in your computer you are possibly not even halfway done. You need the driver too. Maybe the device installs itself as USB-COMM device which modern computers will install as virtual RS-232. But I'm really not sure USB was that major and far along when Windows 98 was released so even if the device is a USB-COMM class device the Windows 98 computer may not recognize and install it as Windows serial port device. If it is not an USB-COMM class device then you would need the according system drivers for Windows 98 (.vxd which are different than the drivers needed for NT based Windows systems such as 2000, XP and newer) and then also create a Modula2 module to access that driver. But manufacturing a device that is produced in 200 pieces a year at 40 $ each does not sound like a good business to me either.

Are you asking us to develop this all for you???? We are not a free consulting service here. I'm sure what you want can be done in LabVIEW though not everything in a very easy way. Expect to spend a few months of programming to get everything as you show in your screen shots. And if you have no LabVIEW experience triple that amount of time. Or you can hire a LabVIEW alliance member in your area to do the work for you.

I've done this in the past with customer specific fonts (containing their company logo etc) by simply adding the font in the distribution and setting its target to <windows directory>/Fonts. I guess there might be an issue about localization sometimes but it worked so far for the systems that was used on.