Mike Ashe

Nothing obvious in the image. Glad to hear the leak seems to have been corrected with your last fix. Hope the triggering still works. Let us know. One note, you might want to consider putting more of this in subVIs. Good luck.

1. If you search the /examples folder (or better use the Find Example VIs tool you will find an example that does exactly what you ask for. You can then modify quickly should take you all of 2 minutes, 10 with mods to call your 20 VIs. 2. Do not cross post your question to multiple topics on LAVAs forum. Very bad form and may incur the wrath of the Vorpul Administrator...l

Where to start? Hmm, I'd start by forgetting about LabVIEW for a short while and use your two most important tools, a pencil and pad of paper to sketch out each of the basic tests you list above, with TV (Units Under Test) and the specific test equipment for each, what the signal settings need to be, the expected TV response, etc. Figure out what you need to do, not how. Do this for each test. Then list the equipment you have available for each test (or are you still picking out equipment?) and the communications method/bus for each (PCI card, PXI, GPIB, Serial, etc). Then look in the \examples directory in LabVIEW for tips on how to talk to each of these (GPIB, serial...). Follow this by searching for example(s) on test executive. Then look up LabVIEW on Amazon.com where you will find many good books. I would suggested "LabVIEW for Everyone" by Jeffrey Travis (third edition will be coming out soon so you may want to wait a while) followed by the top 6 or so books on the Amazon list. Somewhere along this path of enlightenment you should search LAVA for "test Executive" and while you are at it NI's DevZone as well. Once you have done all this you should be well on your way to solving this test problem. If you want to take a shortcut from the above I (and I'm sure several others on this forum) would be happy to quote you help on a paid basis. But beyond that, lets be frank, your question is, how do I say this, a bit broad and asking this type of question on your first post sounds like you are asking us to do your homework for you. Now if you have been dropped into this situation by your employer, if they said, "here is the TV assignment, use LabVIEW, get going, we expect you to be done by next Tuesday...", and you are really new to LabVIEW, well then I can sympathize. NEVERTHELESS, your question, as stated, is more properly suited as an initial question to a local NI Alliance member when you ask them to quote doing the work for you, (or providing "Startup Assistance") not to an advanced (well, it says so in the forum name ;-) ) forum where people volunteer their time and typically answer much more specific questions. Good luck, but you probably shouldn't expect a lot more help until you have narrowed your question a bit and learned a bit more about LabVIEW in general, rather than specific to TV testing. (For Michael Aivaliotis and others: my coffee tastes especially good this morning, so I was feel gentle and generous. Now where was that post on how not to ask your first question ... )

There are a couple of good reasons you don't find many "native LabVIEW" image processing examples. First, LabVIEW simply is not as efficient with the large 2D array manipulations required as C is. (Although with the new matrix math functions it is closing the gap) Secondly there are a lot of image processing libraries already available ranging from $$$ like IMAQ down to no cost like the free Intel image processing libraries (which Irene He used to create her image processing toolkit) and various other open source solutions. You might be better off doing this in C and calling a DLL from LabVIEW. Then again, if you just really really want to do this in LabVIEW, have a happy... "Always listen to the experts, they'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then go do it." ~Excerpts from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long (by Robert Heinlein)

You might want to contact Viewpoint in Rochester, NY and talk/email with Stu McFarlane. http://www.viewpointusa.com/

You might want to search both NI DevZone and the Info-LabVIEW archives. Seems I remember that someone used the MS Windows Agent API (complete with the little "Wizard" with the doofus hat) and posted VIs to get you started. That covers Text-to-Speech. I thought that the same threads on IFLV touched on voice recognition. Here's a couple of the Agent links: Using ActiveX to Control Microsoft Agent Characters Usibng MS Agent with LabVIEW tutorial Here's NI DevZone on Voice Recognition in LabVIEW Googling on LabVIEW Voice recognition will get you a few papers on the subject as well as a link to your own post asking about it here on LAVA.

You are correct in that NI normally will not sell older versions. Assuming that you have your own licensed FDS of LabVIEW 6.1 you might be able to talk one of your local NI reps into helping out. They are pretty accomodating to reasonable requests. Your other option might be to locate an NI Alliance member (or other developer locally) and pay them to compile the EXE's as a service. That would not be a violation of their AB license.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a web page for this kind of thing, either here or at NI. I'm not sure how the licensing issues play out here. I suspect that it wouldn't fly. I seem to recall provisions in the licenses that say something to the effect that we cannot sublet/lease out our copy. But would that restriction hold if we did not charge any money. Hmm, I'll fly this one past NI at our User Group Meeting this week.

Here is my T from my first NIWeek in 95. I just happened to be wearing this (exercise) when I saw Michael's new thread:

It might help us to help you if you could post either a single VI or an image of the DAQ/Trigger loop you are trying to debug. As for specific cards you can go up on the NI sebiste under Products & Services and 20 minutes of reading (tops) will tell you most of what you want to know about the different cards.

If you are using IMAQ Vision you should save off ROI descriptions in a configuration file then at run time use "IMAQ Convert ROI to Annulus.vi" (I usually make a modified version of this) then feed the annulus clusters into "IMAQ Find Circular Edge". This works pretty well, at least when grading Tequila limes :beer: :thumbup:

I have used the numbered free labels and also the string constant with scroll bar. Another method is to pop up on loops or sequences and enter comments in their description about everything inside. Another method I am experimenting with is to leave the free labels, then have the VI link to a help topic in a *.chm file for the overview of the VI and then if I need detailed info I can look up the free label in the chm contents tree. There is a slightly more sophisticated version I'm hacking around with attempting to use scripting to do this cleanly, but it is not ready for prime time. YMMV

If you have a dozen or less machines/IPs at the data rates you mention, then you can probably get away with the simple data server example type, with a few small mods/enhancements. Longer term you might want to think about something a little more flexible and robust. The semi-standard method to do that these days is to make a TCP Listener that waits for connections and then spawns off a copy/template of a single link handler. Each handler services the incoming data from one of your machines and feeds the data into a LabVIEW Queue. Elsewhere in your application you have a VI that takes all the data out of the queue and logs it, performs statistics, display, etc. For the Handlers you have a choice of making physical copies of a re-entrant VI or using templates (*.vit) or GOOP instances. For an example of the GOOP version and some nifty free code, look here on the forums for TCP server. I'll try to directly link OpenGOOP TCP Server Topic Cheers, Mike

I like your toolbar, it looks a lot like one I did for a custom test exec back in the mid 90's. (see VISTE paper in NIWeek 96 proceedings if you have it). It would have been sooooo nice to have this splitter capability back then. Speaking of OpenG, see me by private email, I also have some buttons I've been thinking of packaging. Maybe we could combine.

I agree, and as a suggestion, one or two small Access or MySQL (or one of each :2cents: ) databases and a couple of example VIs with PDF tutorials would make your offering to the world complete for now. I know and have worked with both of the authors of LabSQL and really like it and their internal second generation version as well. But I also like your version. As you said, just another choice.

Seems to work fine under LabVIEW 8 although you get a warning when it first opens (which you can ignore).

One thing that I did not see pointed out earlier (maybe I just missed it) is that the SV acts like an individual Global with timestamp *and access control wrapper* which helps preclude some of the race conditions that we see with regular globals. Another item is that (at least according to NI yesterday at our meeting) you must use Gigabit ethernet to get the Timed-Triggered version to work. I really like the cleanup you can do to your code, especially some of the RT stuff using SVs.

Doggone it Joe, you beat me to the post :2cents: I agree, I loved it too, and thank you for the compliment. Info-LabVIEW and the people on it helped me out a lot when I was starting out, I try to "pass it forward". QBX and embedded LabVIEW is great stuff. I wish we could say more but we were asked and agreed not to for now until it is released. I didn't get a firm date, but I don't think I/we will have to wait for Christmas stockings. It was really neat to hold one in my hand. I downloaded the papers Michael (the other Michael...) pointed to and got really excited. NI did not announce QBX before the seminar, so when they told us there it was a pretty nice bonus for the day. Cheers all, Mike

Yep, your example of the effect works just fine (no sporadic blink) under LV 8 for me.

Is there some reason why you cannot use an array for so many items of the same type? With that many I just have to suspect that you could squeeze out some more program efficiency as well as wiring / coding style efficiency using arrays.

Nice quick example. I can see uses for a user configurable interface. Some groups of users really really like to be able to customize where items are layed out. Do this to clusters of complex data and you could almost simulate a multiple document interface. We can already do that with system calls under Windows, but it is not portable to other platforms. Would be great to have as a generic subVI tool that we register some or all of the controls on a VI at startup time.

Agreed. In a race between security experts and hackers the hackers will almost always win eventually if it is important enough to them. Your security efforts can only make it more and more difficult and labor intensive to circumvent so you cut down on the number of hackers who are willing and able to invest the effort and time. Since we are talking about a LabVIEW application I assume you are creating an executable and one other precaution you might want to take is to not name your security VI with anything descriptive of the method you are using since it is possible to look inside a LabVIEW executable and see the names and even extract the VIs within the application. Don't worry too much, they cannot get to the diagrams or even the front panels of subVIs.

Not sure if I am getting this, but ... It sounds like you want to take an intensity histogram along, say, the Y axis, flattening the image into a vertical line/array, then use these (700) to make up the columns of a new image so that each vertical column (or horizontal line if using the X axis) of the composite image holds the intensity summation of one of the component images. If the 700 images were a time sequence you could then glance across the composite image from left to right and see the summary changes over time. Is this what you are trying to accomplish? Or have I missed the mark totally?

Nice. I have not played with clusters like this for front panels. However I once used something like your technique to make a very large and complex cluster that was being passed all through a large application into a very small "reference" looking control. When it was on a front panel it was about 20x15 pixels, but in it's natural state it was over 1000x1000. I love seeing creative uses of control editing. Too bad I haven't seen any (so far) that are scriptable. It would be nice to make up our own floating tool palette that had a bunch of control customizatin transformations. Then we could select a control, hit the appropriate palette button and get the whoe recipe applied to that control. The closest I have seen is your boolean tool. Great work, thanks again.

Nice toy to know about. Have you used this in any non-trivial applications or is this a spelunking souvenir?