ACS

Here's a heads-up for any LabVIEW developers in Central Texas, or any Certified LabVIEW Architects coming to Austin for the CLA Summit next month.  I will be teaching Actor-Oriented Design in LabVIEW, Sept. 13th - 15th, in the training center at NI's corporate headquarters.  Come take the class, enjoy Austin for the weekend, and stay over for the Summit! Details on the course offering here:

Actor-Oriented Design in LabVIEW

There are offerings in October as well, in MI, MA, and Santa Clara, if those locations are more convenient.

I miss the ribs.  Any chance we can get some this year?

For a circular buffer like this, you can convert the functional global into an actor. The actor's private data would be the data stored by your functional global (anything in a shift register), and it would have one public method for each operation the global supports (write data, read last, etc). You will provide a message for each of these methods, of course.

To use this buffer, launch the actor and pass its queue to whoever needs to access it.

The net effect will be very much like putting your original functional global into a DVR, with no deadlock/race condition concerns.

Greetings!

I am a Certified LabVIEW Architect with 16 years experience developing innovative LabVIEW and TestStand solutions. I am currently seeking short- or long-term projects or employment in Central Texas. Most recently, I was the architect for a systems integration team at a large engineering services firm in Albuquerque, NM. I served as the architect and/or technical lead on several mid-sized to large projects, on project teams consisting of one or more LabVIEW developers, an electrical engineer, and several technicians. Most of my projects have been for Sandia National Laboratories. In that time, I specialized in projects based on CompactRIO and Compact FieldPoint. I have extensive experience with OO in LabVIEW, using both Endevo tools and native LabVIEW. I also have recent experience with LabVIEW web services and clients.

I am primarily available to work in the Austin area, but I can support efforts from San Antonio to Waco, with some restrictions.

Please contact me via private message for additional details.

I tried it through .net and it works.

Awesome, thanks!

Greetings, all!

This is pretty self-explanatory. I need a LabVIEW implementation of the SHA256 hash algorithm. I could do it myself, but I was hoping one already exists. Has anyone written such a beast?

Thanks!

Greetings, all!

I have a client that wants to use a piece of LabVIEW code on Windows XP, Vista, and 7. The application was originally written to run on XP machines, so everything looks OK there. However, on Vista or 7, certain front panel objects appear larger than they do on the XP machine (in one example, all of the string fields in an array of strings are taller). Other objects (such as a text label) appear smaller.

The machines in question all appear to have comparable DPI settings, and monitor resolution does not seem to be a factor. The application uses Application Font in various sizes in the cases of interest. Can anyone suggest some other things we can check?

Thanks!

I'll give this a try; thanks!

Greetings, all.

I want to be able to display the version number of a built executable in an about box. Is there any way to programmatically get this information?

Thanks!

Greetings, all,

I need to call a DLL in the Windows API. The DLL returns a pointer to an array; the array is a list of process identifiers (strings, I presume). What do I need to do with that pointer to get an array of strings?

Thanks!

QUOTE (Darren @ Feb 12 2009, 10:24 AM)

Lest someone read this and get confused, I should point out that LV Class programming is not required on the CLA. You can certainly use them if you want, but they are not a required component of your architecture. I did not use LV Classes in my code for the CLA (and I passed).

-D

True. But the requirements for the toy problem do lend themselves to a class-based design. Even without LabVIEW Classes, applying OO techniques on the test goes a long way toward submitting a clean design. Not required, but very, very helpful.

edit to complete thought: So my point to the OP was that demonstrating one's ability to deliver a good class-based design fits better with the CLA than in the CLD.

QUOTE (Aristos Queue @ Feb 2 2009, 06:08 PM)

If you die of a heart attack while taking a multiple choice test on LabVIEW, are you a CLADaver?

QUOTE (Aristos Queue @ Feb 2 2009, 06:08 PM)

CLD? Maybe. But a part of me wants to hold out for a CLD exam that includes LV classes. I mean, I'd kind of be undermining the prostelytyzing I've been doing the last few years if I actually admitted that someone could be a true LabVIEW developer without classes!

The CLD tests if you can design and implement a state machine. The CLA tests if you can design classes.

<shrug> I'm actually pretty OK with drawing the lines like that. Even with classes, we still do a lot of our work with some form of producer/consumer pattern, usually including a state machine. Someone who has passed the CLD has shown that they are comfortable actually working in the LabVIEW environment with our bread-and-butter tools. I can give that person the design for a class and expect it will get coded, even if that person isn't comfortable with OO principles.

Designing a good class, however, is a whole different skill set. You have to know something about OO, and you have to know how the class will be used in your system, which means knowing how the interactions with the other classes in the system. That's working at the architect level, so it's better covered in the CLA exam.

Honestly, I'm not even sure how you'd implement a toy problem for the CLD that was OO-friendly without requiring OO as part of the solution.

QUOTE (jzoller @ Feb 3 2009, 09:42 PM)

Imagine Microsoft came up with LV.NET: an exact, general purpose clone of LV, just without the hardware access.

I recall having a conversation with an NI person at NI Week some years back. This fellow told me that, in large part, this is exactly why NI markets almost exclusively to the "no programming" crowd - it keeps LabVIEW under Microsoft's radar. NI did not want to get into a shooting war with Microsoft the way that Netscape did over browsers. MS has very deep pockets and could take a loss on a new programming tool for years - long enough to successfully undercut NI's LabVIEW sales. NI may be a hardware company, but LabVIEW sells a lot of that hardware for them. The result of such a war could be disastrous for NI, and, incidentally, all the rest of us who would be forced to use the new, inferior product.

It does make our jobs harder, and it's infuriating to hear someone bad-mouth what I do because they're ignorant of their own shortcomings. OTOH, it means I'm a rare, highly-qualified specialist in a demand market, which is a good place to be these days...

QUOTE (crelf @ Jan 29 2009, 05:30 PM)

Your profile says that you're using LabVIEW 8.6 - I'm not sure that those keys work beyond 7.1. Scripting is now controlled by a license (I *think* that came in around 8.0?)

Oh, OK. Is there a "scripting toolkit" now, or something similar? Does it ship with any of the developer suite DVDs?

Greetings, all,

I am finally starting to look at scripting in LabVIEW. I have downloaded the scripting tools and the package that shows the new VI and New VI Object primitives. I have also added these entries to my INI file:

SuperPrivateScriptingFeatureVisible=True

SuperSecretPrivateSpecialStuff=True

I can access a lot of things that I couldn't before, but I still have trouble getting to most block diagram item properties and methods. I cannot, for example, create a block diagram constant for a "Function" reference. If I look at a property or method node in an example that is working with Function references (Multiply Two Numbers Script.vi), I cannot see any other properties or methods than the one displayed (right clicking and selecting "Select Property" shows no valid properties).

Clearly, I have not successfully enabled scripting on my system. What else do I need to do? I am working with 8.6, if that helps.

Thanks!

Greetings,

I need to write a function in LabVIEW to move files to or from a PDA (an HP iPAQ, in this instance). Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks!

Greetings,

My customer is building a tool based on a PDA (the HP iPAQ, as it happens). He wants me to build a companion application that runs on a PC that will, among other things, rebuild the PDA application should something happen to it.

I thought of using the Project API to access and execute the correct build specification, but none of the Project API methods/properties appear to be available from LabVIEW Run-Time. Does anyone know of a workaround?

Thanks in advance!

The title says it all. Are we going to Salt Lick this year, and where can I sign up if we are?

Count me in, as usual.