hooovahh

I'm biased (as is probably most on here). Professionally I've only ever done LabVIEW and I've seen no career limiting issues. In college CS101/102 was Java, I've leaved basic C++ with an Arduino, and I've done some minor .Net and C# but I don't put those last two on a resume. That being said I think only knowing LabVIEW is doing a disservice to yourself, and NI. I mean LabVIEW isn't perfect, and other languages do some things better than LabVIEW and some things are easier to do in LabVIEW than traditional languages. Learning the pros and cons about each can help make decisions about the right tools to use, and can help discussions with those who might tell you, you need to learn C.

Thank you for your suggestions and I am going to schedule a Dr. appointment to get checked out. Since noticing this I've tried changing a few habits and I think it might help. I tried mapping my back and forward buttons on my mouse to CTRL but it was too hard to get used to, especially for things like CTRL dragging which now needs me to hold forward, then click and drag the left mouse button, a movement I've never done before. Also I only applied the CTRL mapping when in LabVIEW which also made changing the habit harder since things like Forward+C is copy in LabVIEW but not explorer, there I actually wanted forward to go forward. I changed my seat to sit higher, so my hands aren't pointed up, I lifted the front of my keyboard slightly, (again so hands are slightly down) and added some padding by resting my wrist on a some foam leather material I had. Starting this morning I've mapped my Caps Lock key to CTRL in all of the OS (because who uses that anyway) and I'll try using that to see if there is less stretching. I've tried stretching throughout the day but am probably doing it wrong, I'll google a bit. But none of these changes are replacements for a professionals' opinion. Oh and left handed mouse? Might as well ask me to swap brake and gas petals on only one of my cars.

Hey all. So I'm relatively young, but I've noticed recently that my left hand is giving me more and more issues, and I suspect it is partially related to LabVIEW programming and I'm wondering if others are in my position, or if they had any suggestions. Programming for me has my left hand on the home keys and my right on the mouse which I think is typical of most people. I currently don't use auto-tool much so I have lots of tabbing going on. When I tab I find I move my hand to the left and up a bit so my middle finger does the tabbing. I think this works fine for me for the most part. Where I think the issue is for me is the constant use of the CTRL key. So I compulsively save (CTRL+S), I'm often switching between windows (CTRL+E) closing (CTRL+W) running (CTRL+R) various cut, copy, paste, undo, redo operations, moving windows from one monitor to the other (CTRL+Space for me) lots of quick drop (CTRL+D for me), various quick drop shortcuts. I also use CTRL+T in Chrome a lot. This causes me to stretch my pinky, away from my index finger in an awkward manor. Also most of the time I'm on a non-ergonomic keyboard without a wrist guard, so even if I have my elbows at my sides my hand needs to turn left at the wrist to get my pinky where I want, stretch fingers out, then force CTRL and the commanded key. I've tried twisting the keyboard clockwise so I don't need to turn my wrist, but I still find it a strain to stretch fingers. After a few hours I find my wrist has lots of painful pressure, and I can pop it by quickly moving it from a straight position to one curling left, which is a relief for a few minutes. I've thought about buying some extreme split keyboards like this but I'm not certain it'll help because my issue seems to be constant CTRL usage. I've also thought about getting a foot pedal for activating CTRL. I have a 5 button mouse so I may try to map a button on it to CTRL and see if that helps. Do others have the left hand strain? Is it just me? Any suggestions?

Yeah I'd just look at what VIPM does. In the about screen they state they use open source software with a link to a license file that mentions OpenG and the other BSD tools used. I'm not a lawyer but I'm betting JKI either has one, or consulted one when it comes to this topic.

So I finally got around to looking into this issue, and I think I found the issue. In the VI at this path: <user.lib>\_LAVA\VariantProbe\AddValue.vi We take the Tree reference, then get the Owning VI reference, the and the VI Panel Reference. The issue is it looks like these are new references each call, and they aren't closed. So the solution is to add 3 Close References at the end of this VI, one to close the Panel, the VI, and the Tree control (this one probably doesn't matter but still) After adding these three closes, the probe seems to still work like normal, but the VI I posted previously doesn't take forever for LabVIEW to close.

Crosspost

Very cool, I saw your effort on the NI side and was hoping to see more refinement. I hate XControls too, but when there is lots of polish, the can make the use of them so much nicer. I still think this is too early to be thinking about them, but in the future, when this is somewhat feature complete, I'd recommend trying to shove it into an XControl, and make it easy to use.

I have no personal experience doing this. All I've seen are articles that make it seem like a relatively easy process. If you haven't yet, read these and see if they help. http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/21BA0F671A63A60386256CB4004DF99B http://www.ni.com/white-paper/3185/en/

Your Google-fu fails you. https://lavag.org/topic/16197-magical-variant-to-data-or-bug/ It seems it is not in all circumstances. Personally I like this kind of feature, assuming you can always override it with the Data Type input. I took this concept and used it on my Variant Repository XNode, which has a similar feature where it looks up stream to try to figure out what data type it should be. Sorta like a polymorphic VI having the Automatic option.

(but seriously I realize there are spelling differences between us)

Oh that's not that too hacky, thanks for the link a quick search didn't find that one. I was wondering how you would hide or shot based on mouse movement. I guess the trick is that the Mouse Enter event isn't when dragging from explorer, until you release the mouse button.

You should post your code and give more details about your setup. If you are opening and closing the transfer every time this is probably expected. Keeping the reference open the whole time will probably improve total transfer time. It was probably an accident, but you should also not make two topics.

I didn't mean anything by it and didn't really take offense, sorry if it came across as hostile. (BTW I am one of those dang kids ) (but I also haven't used a Mac for more than 5 minutes in my life)

So I'm a bit confused, are you on Windows or Mac, cause you say you mean Explorer, but then said Finder which "is what windows explorer used to be called". I believe Windows Explorer used to be called File Manager in the Windows 3.x days. And what do you mean by "Dang you kids", there could be people of any age that just have never used a Mac. I didn't say LabVIEW doesn't support drag and drop, I'm saying there are options for doing drag and drop from an Explorer, but none are clean, other than onto a path control. I've seen several neat examples, like this one with dragging an image on a tab. The source isn't available but I wouldn't be surprised if a path control just isn't on top of the image since you don't interact with the image. I believe LabVIEW doesn't have a unified way of doing this because it is cross platform, and you could be using any number of shells for any OS and supporting all of them would be a pain. I like the idea, but I have yet to need this feature.

What is a "finder". Do you mean you are dragging and dropping from the Windows explorer window? If so someone posted an example on LAVA that uses some windows messaging library. https://lavag.org/topic/14540-drop-into-a-tree-from-other-program/#entry87760 Another trick I've seen is that the path control allows you to drop files on it, so you might be able to get a path control and make it transparent, and put it over your listbox.

From what I've seen, most password protected VIs shipped by NI are just call by library nodes, to a method that they don't want to be exposed. By keeping the low level call passworded, they can change the interface underneath but the terminals of the output of that subVI don't have to change. Looking over the list of possible calls to the LabVIEW internals I'd say they are calling the GetLVEventQueueDebugData function.

I thought so too but personally never had this issue. The Event Inspector Window is indeed a LabVIEW UI. I posted at some point where I wanted the ability to get a queue status on user events, similar to a normal queue here. I eventually made an idea exchange (linked in that thread) but looking at the source you can see that there is some what of an API for reading the event queue but it is for the whole application, and you need to do decent amount of filtering to get to the structure you want, and the events you want. I'll be honest I haven't personally used this beyond a demo to see that it is possible, I don't know what kind of potential memory issues using this might have. That being said I do have a demo that shows it in action. Attached is a VI that when ran will query the event inspector data and show the events queued up, what VI they are from along with the event type. As a demo just try to resize the VI when it is running to see it in action. Demo Event Queue Read.vi

Is this cheap USB also plugged into some kind of hub? I can't remember the details but I know I had some kind of issue where trying a different USB configuration helped on a few small setups using a laptop where we didn't have many options like adding a PCI RS-232 card. As for programs there are several on the net that basically monitor, and log data seen on a COM port. I haven't personally used this one, but looking at the screenshot it looks similar to others. This is usually a higher level debug tool, just looking at the messages going back and forth, and probably won't tell you anything about a driver crap out situation.

I don't know how things work at NI, but I wouldn't be surprised if efforts aren't ramped up as soon as the first alpha of Windows 10 is available. If it were me I wouldn't ramp up develop and test until the final release candidate is available, and it seems that didn't happen until last May time frame. I mean I don't think the user base is really there, so not being ready until February isn't holding back that many people is it? I mean I have yet to see a test system, or any NI hardware connected to a Windows 8 machine yet. Not saying it doesn't happen but I'm not surprised. Oh just out of curiosity I looked it up, Windows 7 came out on July 2009, and support for Windows 7 didn't come until LabVIEW 2009 SP1 in February.

You probably already know this but, as far as I know, no NI software has been released, which officially supports Windows 10. This usually doesn't mean it won't work, and I've heard some people say they have LabVIEW 2015 on Windows 10 and haven't seen any issues yet. But it looks like others are having various Windows 10 issues. Until February I'm guessing there isn't much we can do without NI support. http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/Windows-10-compatibility-with-applications-developed-in-LabView/td-p/3169517 http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/compatibility-with-windows-10-and-DAQmx-14/td-p/3197358 http://forums.ni.com/t5/Multifunction-DAQ/Windows-10-myDAQ-Driver-Not-Working/td-p/3182525 https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/Windows-10-with-two-task-bars/td-p/3198937

Oh and there is the Windows power settings you may want to check. Windows can choose to turn off USB ports seemingly randomly to save power.

I would not recommend posting your email on a public forum, spam bots crawl these sites. That being said the examples you are asking for are from the actual exam and cannot be shared or discussed. "It would technically be against their NDA for people to give out information on those since they are the currently active CLD exams (that I know of). Do not expect to get any information on those or people will lose their certification." Study the example exams, be familiar with these 6 scenarios, and feel free to post on the certification board. http://forums.ni.com/t5/Certification/bd-p/Certification

Generally you open once, do your work, and close once. Generally you use Synchronous messaging so that you don't need to worry about time delays in reads or writes it just returns the data when it is ready. Not all protocols support this, but most end with a return character making it relatively easy. If you are questioning LabVIEW, try writing a simple serial VI that opens, reads/writes and closes then run it for hours to check your sanity.

After launching the Clear Compiled Object Cache from Tools >> Advanced >> Clear Compiled Object Cache... a window appears with a listbox showing two items, User and Application Builder. By default both are already selected just click Delete. If you only want to delete one select that one, then click Delete.

A lot has changed in 4 years but this still seems to be the normal behavior of a tree control. At some point the multicolumn listbox was improved to actually realize when a column was deleted by right clicking, and adjust horizontal scrollbar size accordingly. But there isn't a similar option for a tree control. Replacing the control does indeed convince LabVIEW the number of columns are different, and that is how I've always handled this situation. One step that might help make this process easier is you can replace a control in LabVIEW, with one in your clipboard, and have all the references, and events on that control go to the new one. I tested this and it does behave as you'd expect in terms of the number of columns. I created a tree with a string in columns 3 and 4, then deleted the string in column 4 and saw that the size according to the visible scrollbar still shows column 4 in the size. I then created a new tree, copied it to the clipboard, selected the old tree and pasted, which replaced the old one with the new one. Changing the column width to 1 pixel can work as well.