Mike Ashe

Your toolkit is nice. However I am wondering why you did this with LabSQL available as opensource? Did you just want to have your own?

Have you checked out this page on NIDevZone for GPS serial read? Read GPS Time, Position, Velocity ... Might help.

I second the suggestion. You should rethink/implement this. Consider a single tree on the FP and give your user a single column listbox to select which "tree" data structure from the internal array to display and edit on the FP. If you need your user to compare items in two trees then place two trees on the front panel and give each a pull-down menu or lstbox to select from. The array of trees idea is a problematic one at best.

Yes, your request is a little unclear. Could you post a short 2D table of data showing exactly what you are trying to get? That will probably make it pretty trivial to give you the right solution/VIs. In fact, the exercise of doing it in a table for us will probably show you how to do it yourself. If not we'll help.

Medical Tricorders, complete with the remote sensor ...

We could tell you, but only if you can prove your brain is password protected ...

For my money either VIServer or TCP/IP is the way to go and I usually use TCP/IP. Fast, flexible and you can hook or be hooked into external text based programs pretty easily.

I'm not going to do the homework for you, but if you Google on: "Get BIOS Serial Number" and do a little research you can figure out a way to use the BIOS serial number on the unique machine. This is much less likely to be changed than a hard drive and is also more secure. I have seen cracking toolkits that explicitly give tools that get around hard drive security number methods. Good luck.

If you have a big budget the CompactRIO and Vision systems are a great way to go. If the $$$ are a little tighter you might want to look at: 1. The LabVIEW USB Camera option(s): Acquiring USB Images With LabVIEW While you're there be sure to check Irene He's Vision Toolkit. 2. ebaY for used NI hardware. You don't find a lot of NI motion controllers (some), but you find a lot of inexpensive digital IO and older multifunction DAQ cards that might provide most, if not all, of the IO you need for pennies on the dollar. Good luck and have fun!

Hopefully you're wrong on both accounts, but thats very forgiveable! It is actually probably your first medium sized application and if you keep working with LabVIEW it surely should not be your best. It is amazing how one's definition of "large application" and "best coding practices" change with experience. The first time I was involved in a LabVIEW app that exceeded 1000 VIs I thought we'd coded the biggest thing in the world. Then I found out about one that exceeded 8000... Perhaps I shouldn't tell you this, but there are actually about a half a dozen ways to move data between loops, so just file that datum away for now and concentrate on the event stuff Michael Aivaliotis pointed you too and the gueues PJM expounded on. Queues remain my favorite. Amen to that. A pretty reasonable way to look at the Event Structure is that it is an interrupt handler, software interrupts rather than hardware. No, it's not exactly that, but the analogy holds. An Interrupt Handler, properly used always does the absolute minimum with the data and takes as little time as possible. It catches the interrupt, verifies what type, performs any _must do_ data massaging and then passes the work off to another routine, usually queued, and goes back to watching for the next interrupt.Go, and do thou likewise ...

Reminds me that a simple security technique we used several years ago is no longer valid. Back in the days of attribute nodes, before property nodes you had to popup on the individual control in a cluster on the front panel to create an attribute node. We would put a text control in a cluster, set a password in it as default, make an attribute, turn the control invisible (actually hide) and then delete the attribute node off the diagram. There was now no way to make it visible again. Unless someone knew it was there and where to look you'd never find it. We used this both as a simple password storage and also as a way to "watermark" our work sometimes. Obviously obsolete now.

There was one program for half a semester, but it got canceled when someone figured out that the title of the concentration would not fit on the standard diploma & forms, which had to be issued on paper. What an irony.

If someone bought in May, June, July, Oct or Nov I would say someone should be pretty happy. For the long term NI is stable. Note that the last year looks pretty much like a square wave. This would be great if the period of the waveform was stable I have to admit, I'm happier with Apple at the moment. :thumbup:

I must not be evolved enough to qualify for this board. In the meantime, would someone pass me the LabVIEW drivers for "SynchroDestiny". I intend to measure the difference of twist in the DNA helix between dinosaurs and Destinaurs. Now where did I leave my amber ...

The old old serial driver files from NI, before VISA, were very small. I don't recall the exact size, a couple dozen K I think. Certainly orders of magnitude less than VISA or NET. That would be a nice solution. A friend at another company did some asking and complaining to NI and eventually was told how you can use the older serial files with newer versions of LabVIEW. For him, part of the whole issue revolved around the loss of single file executables after 5.1 and support for Win98. I forget the details, but bottom line is that there is a way to use the older serial drivers, and there should also be a way to use a small open source serial library codebase if someone really needed it.

You might want to consider backing up a step and basing your configuration setup and files on arrays of clusters. You also should look at the OpenG Variant Data and Variant Config File VI sets.

It is easier (and cheaper) to write shared library code to hook things into Linux and if you are a good programmer in that environment you have a lot of flexibility. But with Windows you have a much larger customer base and a lot more functionality available quickly, both in LabVIEW itself and in OS functions like ActiveX, etc. Are your DAQ applications only for yourself? If so you might want to stick with Linux if the apps needs are simple. If you expect to have customers or your needs are moderately complex you should think a bit more.

Lets back up a bit. What are you trying to do for your overall application? Secondly, you say that the Excel Toolkit VIs are not executable. If I recall correctly those were from older versions of both LabVIEW and MS Office. You might have to go to the ActiveX controls, nodes and relink to the Office ActiveX routines. What version of Office are you running?

Let's be honest, there are a lot of simple questions, there are even some stupid ones, and lets call them that. I can excuse even those, occasionally, and I think most of the others on this (and other forums) do as well. That being said, I have to admit I've asked a few stupid ones myself, especially on a hard debugging task at 3 AM and the system has to work later that day and the last of the coffee is gone :headbang: What is not excusable is someone asking us to do their homework for them, or being demanding. :thumbdown: Perhaps a compromise is an open forum for general topics, but with some topics/forums only open to test passers. Yet we don't want to discourage newbies who will/are falling in love with LabVIEW. I for one really love it when I see a newbie "get it", when they obviously start to think in G rather than C -> translate in head -> G.

I have to agree with Rolf, allthough it is interesting, as a substitute for VISA -> .NET is a move in the wrong direction. What is needed is a very small add-on for serial. An open-source generic C codebase with both source and binary code. Windows DLL, Shared Libraries for Linux and OS-X using identical function names and a OurSerialLib.* name for the library so that the LabVIEW Call-Library node will use the wildcards and we get some semi-platform independence. Anything else and we might as well stick with VISA since we already have it.

Apply Occam's Razor: Always choose the simplist possible explaination or solution first. :headbang:

There is nothing wrong with your basic approach/algorithm. Now that you have the unwrap VI you can start. I would be interested in hearing what you plan to do to characterize the iris to make it identifiable. Good Luck and Merry Christmas

"Among hackers,

If you mean coordinate transforms between polar and cartesian, yes, IMAQ Vision can do this. If you mean unwrapping the donut shape of the iris into a rectangle you may have a little more difficulty. There is a VI for unwrapping the dials on a meter face. It is called IMAQ Unwrap. Menus: Vision >> Vision Utilities >> Image Manipulation >> IMAQ Unwrap