hooovahh

We bought a new perpetual license of LabVIEW for our VIA a few months ago. It worked just like the old one. I was able to add it to the VLA software, then create disconnected licenses for my users, or machines. The discount offered was frankly way more than we were expecting. It wasn't in the budget this year, but my manager was able to push it through. When this year is up, we will look into if it makes financial sense to purchase another year or not. I think we skipped 3 years of software buying, so upper management was happy to have saved those years in software cost, and am grateful we didn't take NI up on their offer to get a locked in price for 3 years on the subscription model. Oh and as for Windows 11, it doesn't have to be all bad. We have a set of software that gets installed on a base Windows 11 that uses OpenShell to bring the start menu back, ExplorerPatcher, and a couple WinAero Tweaker settings to do things like have the normal context menu, bring paint back, set remote desktop, and various other things people are used to. None of my users so far have realized it isn't Windows 10. These tweaks shouldn't be necessary, but at least there is options to make it better.

People will decorate their office with retro software boxes, and game boxes. So yes various LabVIEW manuals, books, and old software gets you a bit of nerd cred. I have a box of Windows 3.1 on my shelf next to my copy of LabVIEW for everyone, LabVIEW 7.0, and my bound thesis.

Writing strings to TDMS that are a byte stream can be tricky. I have a Read/Write Cluster to TDMS and it flattens it to a string. But as you noticed there needs to be special consideration for null. Well it also turns out that on different platforms there are other characters that need special attention too. You can absolutely do extra work on your images. But I fear that you won't get the performance you want. TDMS is crazy fast and all, but it sounds like a bonkers amount of data real fast, and I don't know if it will be able to keep up, especially if there is special code needed to convert a string ready to be written to TDMS so the null (and any other characters you want) get written correctly. Writing an array of bytes also sounds crazy for this application. The number of samples on the channels might approach NI's limitations for the data type, and then keeping track of where the offsets are for files would need to be a separate channel. I've done stuff like this for logging raw CAN frames to TDMS files but that seems like way less data. Honestly you might be better served writing to binary files, then having the TDMS file just keep an index of the file names or locations for replay. Not sure how I'd go about solving this.

Thank you for your continued reports. If it continues to be a problem Michael will twist various knobs behind the scenes.

Because of a thread over on the darkside, I got the motivation to improve this code, and include the Google Material icons in it. I posted the package over on VIPM.IO. This uses the native 2D picture control for displaying icons like I wanted. It still requires Windows due to how icons are resized, but maybe that could be worked around if there is interest. https://www.vipm.io/package/hooovahh_boolean_vector_controls/ Install the package and its dependencies and you'll have a Tools >> Hooovahh >> Boolean Control Creation... Once ran it will start trying to display all the icons the toolkit installed. In the background it will be converting the vector images to 56x56 PNGs to be able to display them in the window. I tried being smart and having it prioritize icons that you scrolled to, but I honestly don't know how well it works. It basically takes about a minute after first launching it to have all of its icons displayed properly. You can use the tool during that minute but not all the icons will be available yet. From that point on you can scroll around and resize the window and it should work as expected, just a little bit slow at times. There is a single constant on the block diagram where you can change the icon side. At one point I had icon size be a control on the front panel but since it took about a minute to process all the images for every change I just left it. Some of the icons have multiple versions. If you left click on an icon and a window pops up you can pick from what version of that icon you'd like to use. Then create a control using that icon. You can theoretically put your own EMF files in the folder with the rest but at the moment it doesn't scan for new files since it is relatively slow to find all icons on every launch. What I'm saying is compromises had to be made. Maybe I could have a separate program that gets ran in the Post Install VI that starts processing the icons right away in parallel. That way the tool might be done processing icons by the time the user launches it for the first time. I did use the Post Install and Post Uninstall to do extra work since there are so many individual files. Normally you'd have VIPM handle the files but it took a long time. So the package just installs a Zip, and the Post Install will unzip them. This also means Post Uninstall needs to delete the extracted files. Not ideal but the install time was much longer otherwise.

One other odd side effect is I've seen several reports that are clearly bots, that think it is a reply system. The report will be a normal spam message but reporting some content. So at least those ones only I need to deal with and you won't see. Sorry again about all this. I have talked to the site admin again emphasizing the severity, and frequency.

Oh sorry I didn't read your post closely enough. I don't know how to do that.

I think what you want is MoveBlock. This is basically a function that takes a pointer and returns the actual data at the pointer. I don't deal with DLL calling often, and I have a hard time figuring out things so I might be wrong. You may want to do some research into it. Here are a few links.

We are at the whim of the city planners to approve of the use of the fire extinguisher...okay the analogy falls apart a bit there.

I do occasionally have correspondence with him. He is aware of the spam issue and we've talked about turning on content approval. He seems to want to update the forums and just has limited bandwidth to do so. Until that happens I'll just keep cleaning up the spam that gets through.

I did try to implement inflate/deflate in pure G. There was a website that explained in pretty easy to understand english how the compression works, and gave example code on how to implement it. I went through it step by step but it still wasn't producing the correct data. After trying in my free time for a bit I gave up. I thought it would be helpful on Linux RT for web server stuff where it could make PNG compressed images. There are alternatives.

Oh yeah it sucks. I do what I can, I contact the admin when there are issues I can't resolve. I appreciate your patients.

It does put more spam in my inbox. Honestly with how frequent things are I'd say make a single report of any kind, then I'll review all the posts by the newest users. Banning a user deletes all of their stuff, so just one report to get my attention is enough.

It's just every morning sorry. I was getting emails when reports came in. This made it easy to review them from my phone as they came in but that broke some time last year. So now I need to check the site for spam, or reported content.

I don't have that feature available to me. I'll mention it to the admin.

Moderator tools are way more restrictive than Administrator. I appreciate the support but it is all I can do to get rid of the stuff manually that makes it through until better tools are installed or upgraded.

Also just so others know, you don't have to report every post and message by a user. When I ban an account it deletes all of their content so just bringing attention to one of the spam posts is good enough to trigger the manual intervention.

Honestly my tools for fighting this are quite limited at the moment. That's why upgrades are likely to come. Until then thanks for your patients. I also check the Unread Content section and hate it to see it blasted with 100s of garbage. When I'm at work it is easy to just refresh once in a while and delete it as it comes. But then Brian goes to sleep, and robots don't need sleep. Maybe the next upgrade will be if I can become a robot.

You guys are on point with the meme. So Snippets in general still work for me. I just tested one from NI's site and it was fine without needing to run as admin. That being said I know there were issues with LAVA and those might still exist. If I go to this NI post: https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/Serial-port-number-savings-in-ini-file-executable-with/m-p/3957698#M1126478 There is a snippet. If I drag that pictures to LabVIEW it doesn't work. If I right click the image and choose open in new tab, then drag that image, it also doesn't work...BUT If I take the URL which was this: https://forums.ni.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/251299iAB15C965246CD61E/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 and change it to this: https://forums.ni.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/251299iAB15C965246CD61E Then drag that to LabVIEW it does work.

Yeah it sure has. It has slowed down believe it or not. But I do still see new accounts being made. I'll just keep trying to flag spam as I see it, until new upgrades are complete.

Hello all. The last 72 hours we've had some issues with spam bots taking over the forums, pretty aggressively. As a result new account creation has been temporarily disabled. Thanks to all those using the report feature. I don't read every post but I do read every new thread title and you are very helpful in spotting issues. There might be some forum upgrades taking place soon to help combat this issue. After which the new user creation will be turned back on. Nothing is scheduled yet but this is meant to be a heads up that the forums might have some down time soon and it is to be expected. Thanks for your patients.

Anyone else getting their popcorn? I cannot predict the future. And worrying about things I can't control gives me anxiety. So I'm just going to chug along as best as I can. My boss likes the work I do, and I like my job. I'll be mindful of industry changes. But at the moment I am not pivoting away from LabVIEW or NI if I can't help it.

I only worked with an FPGA CAN device once, and it was a long time ago. For me there was an example that showed how to create a DMA on the FPGA to send raw data back on. Then on the host you could read or write the raw CAN frames. From there you could use my frame signal conversion library. But I've never used them on the sbRIO so I'm unsure how that process is different. I'd be surprised if there wasn't some kind of CAN example installed with the software. From LabVIEW go to Help >> Find Examples and then search. I suspect the CAN port won't show up in MAX. To use it you need to write code, or open an example.

This looks interesting. What are the licensing used? What are the restrictions? Is there a manual that is in English? Is the source code available?

So I use Inno Setup for making most of my LabVIEW installers. It is pretty easy to setup file association with the registry like the LabVIEW Wiki mentioned. Here is a post explaining some of the settings. Once I'm on the LabVIEW side I've always used the property node Application >> Command Line Arguments. Maybe I've just used that because the event didn't always exist? I'd like to think the property node gives you more control since I can send other command line arguments not just a file. But the majority of the time I do just want the file path.