Tim_S

Are you looking for color, black and white or thermal? What resolution do you need? What frame rate do you need? Are you looking for USB, firewire, or ethernet connection? Is the camera in a hazardous environment? What's the distance from the camera to the area you are looking at? How big is the area you are looking at? You've got these and a whole mess of other questions to answer to pick a camera which are all based on what you're going to use the camera for. NI does have some vendors that they have partnered with, which you can get to on their website; the salesmen are typically very helpful about helping you pick out one for your application. Good luck Tim

I found a NI Forums post on how to combine VI server and packed libraries. I tried it with LV 2010 and had no luck to get it work with a class. Tim

This might be what you're looking to do. I unfortunately don't recall where I found this code to give credit, but it demonstrates how to use plugins in LV. Tim LVOOP Plugins Example.zip

Wow, I remember that hardware from LV 3.1 days... My best guess is they are recommanding you keep switching tasks of 1 channel each. This could be perfectly fine if your monitoring and updates involves seconds (versus milliseconds) and your channel count is low. It wouldn't be my preferred method, however that may be the answer if that's the hardware you've got to work with. Tim

Okay, there's one I'm not familiar with. What's WAG? Just to make sure I understand this ('cause I've *cough* occasionally been known to be wrong)... If I have TopLevel.vi which calls SubA.vi which calls SubB.vi, and I put a request deallocation in SubB.vi, then TopLevel.vi has to go idle before the deallocation occurs? Tim

I shall be interested in how this gets answered. I've put it in code where I knew there was a large amount of memory usage, but I've not seen performance improvements in how I've used them. A contractor we had in put them in every VI he created, but that doesn't seem right either. I've had Windows XP terminate a program (happens when program uses >= 2 GB) before LabVIEW 8.0 was unable to gather more memory. Tim

A former coworker put an error message in that said (paraphrased) 'this condition can never happen so you'll never see this message'. Unfortunately it did happen and we received a call from an irate customer. I've been rather cautious about what I put in my error messages since, especially since I wouldn't put it past some of my customers to smack me. Tim

We put together test equipment. General rules for what to get in a PC for us are: - 4 GB RAM, possibly more if it's a NVH application - Faster dual-core processor. The only time we used 4 cores was with a LabVIEW 8.0 application and 3+ cores slowed the test by ~40% due to multi-threading. We've not tried more than two cores since, so I can't comment on what the improvement has been since. - Does the PC has enough ISA/PCI/PCIe slots (yes, we still occassionally use one ISA card... baffling) Video cards have only come up once when a customer wanted 4 monitors from one PC. Otherwise, the screens don't update that much information that disabling updates for a moment doesn't take care of performance issues. The performance issues I run into is with multi-column list boxes when doing something like setting colors of individual cells (red=fail, green=pass), and populating tables. Graphs don't give me issues; I've tested putting 10,000 waveforms of 16k points each on a graph and had a slight performance hit when zooming in and out.

Lots of good discussion. Just my mesely $0.02... This doesn't look like a bug to me, but as operating as designed. I don't believe is should produce an error, however I can see it producing a warning. A use case for this that I can think of is a Watchdog Timer, though, honestly, I would add the non-Timeout event case in as well to clarify the code. Tim

We have "build machines" which are virtual machines, but you've got the idea for what we do. Tim

I'm guessing you're still logged in. I was logged out a couple of times (gotta love IE) and the unread content didn't update. Tim

There are good tutorials on NI's website. Tim

You'll want to talk with your local NI representative about your application. You'd have to get much more indepth into what you're doing to help you with a solution, which is what many of us do for our day job. As such I don't think you're going to get a lot of help from these forums. Otherwise... The DAQ synchronization is a hardware and driver level capability; some NI cards can do this so pay attention when you pick your hardware. I'm not certain if LabWindows can be compiled for the RT OS. LabVIEW can be. Tim

Excellent! Do they perform Masochism Tango as well?

What do you mean by losing control? Have you tried watching the front panel with highlighted execution? Tim

I believe you can get the same through .NET if you're using Windows. Unfortunately I'm not finding code that does this in my "oh, neat" library. Tim

The answer is it depends. It depends on what everything else is doing, how fast it has to respond, and the requirements of the system and the systems it's hooked to (the serial links in this case). You can perform UI monitoring in one loop and the other tasks in other loop(s). If you are going to receive messages and have to turn a response around in 1 second, then a single loop may be fine unless you have to always receive data and save data, which will block execution if the user has to interact with a file dialog box. (I phrased that awkwardly, but I think the idea is there.) Tim

Excellent! In multiple languages even! That's getting bookmarked. ('Cause I know I need a swift kick every now and then!) Tim

Why not look at the example code that ships with LabVIEW? Tim

I was at Lazer Zone, which is a pizza/laser tag/mini-golf/game place and happened to look at this touchpanel control for a room where you shoot foam balls at each other. The controls looked familiar. I realized the control system for the room was written in LabVIEW. I was able to verify this when an employee came over and logged into the system to start the game by the icon in the corner of the pop-up. This geeked me to where I had to point it out to people I was there with. They thought it was neat, but, well, they aren't LabVIEW programmers. Anyone found LabVIEW used in other unexpected places? Tim

Good luck with the surgery and recovery. People seem to text quite well with their iPhones and Blackberries while walking. That might not be so good of an idea, though, as people have been known to fall into manholes. Tim

I recommend taking an actual image (really a set of images) and trying to evaluate each one. You're going to wind up using filters to process the image so you can get rid of the extraneous and measure what you're looking for. Posting code of what you've tried will provide more fruit as it shows you've at least tried something. Tim

The driver and hardware handles the streaming to disk. You can perform video capture with NI hardware. Check the examples as there is one in there (assuming you have IMAQ driver installed).

I've not tried what you're proposing, however it seems you are going to be sending a lot of data strait to disk. RAID, of whatever flavor, itself won't help that, however it may let you link enough hard drives to have the space you need. I believe your bottleneck is the hard drives ability to write data fast enough. Anything with very high bandwidth may also be designed for a computer room and not a shop floor (15k RPM drives do not survive long when exposed to 108-degC temperatures instead of nice A/C environment). Tim

Sadly I quite understand this...