Neil Pate

Mixed messages here...

I was poking around tonight trying to bring a cRIO VM up to speed and realised just how many places on disk or in MAX and other applications they use the name National Instruments. Changing all those over to NI is going to be a job even bigger than developing NXG!

This is going to get pretty confusing to the next generation of ambitious engineers using the products.

WOOT!

Just tested this MQQT library running on a simulated cRIO in a VM and it also works and can talk to my Azure IoT hub 🤩

1 hour ago, Dataflow_G said:

The logo is pretty uninspired and looks lifted from this company.

 

Wow that does look pretty similar! I guess the missing square in the top right corner makes all the difference though, there is no way anyone could get confused.

I am not sure sure about the colour appearing in NXG though. new-NI has collected lots of data which conclusively proves that engineers and scientists are actually put off by colour and so are sticking to light grey, dull grey and washed out grey.

This is the only change I made to the MQTT library. Simples 🙂

@mads

Awesome, it works! Thank you for your suggestion. I did not realise TLS could be done "simply", I was messing around with certificates and stuff and getting nowhere!

1 hour ago, Mads said:

Port 8883 is usually used for TLS (1883 for non-TLS).

There are a couple of examples of how to use TLS in 2020, if you search for TLS in the examples finder:

 

Thanks, I did actually search but did not press enter and just bailed when the Keywords list was empty!

1 minute ago, Francois Normandin said:

If it's a commercial project and you're on a deadline, you can check Wireflow's MQTT client. It ain't free, but supports TLS. http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/fr/nid/213501

Yes I am more than happy to pay for a commercial toolkit, but I did try this out also and it did not connect either. I will get in touch with them I think 🙂

Wow, 2020 could really do with an example of how to use TLS!

Thank Francois. I believe Azure does support 3.1 but I cannot recall where I saw this info.

I think the problem is the missing TLS which I am now digging into. Now I am down a rabbit hole of security concepts and terminology that I have only ever had a passing interest in. TLS, X.509, primary thumbprints 🤯

Thanks, I am actually already about half-way through the 2020 installation so I can check out the TLS stuff.

That library you mentioned is what I am using, I did try modifying all the settings that seem sensible (for example Azure IoT hub uses port 8883) but it still does not work. Actually the connect seems to work, and the publish does not give any errors but no data appears in my hub. I am still very much a newbie in Azure IoT so there is a lot to learn for me.

Hi,

I am trying to send a simple message to an Azure IoT hub. I am pretty new to all this, but have followed a few tutorials and Pluralsight courses and can successfully send a message from VS Code to my hub.

What I have not been able to do yet is send a message using LabVIEW. I have tried several different MQTT libraries, without any success. Has anyone done this kind of thing before and can offer guidance on which toolkit they used?

I am using VSCode to generate the SAS token and using that as the password.

Edit: I have been able to send some messages using simple C# code, this code works fine.

37 minutes ago, drjdpowell said:

I've pointed out the sluggishness.  It's actually the slowness of opening from panels and block diagrams and in opening right-click menus that is a bigger problem, IMO.

The whole IDE is unacceptably sluggish. Doing any kind of block diagram create/remove space feels terrible. Everything just takes a few hundred ms to a second longer than it ought to. Tearing out tabs into new windows feels so heavy.

When I start NXG now from fresh I get a total system freeze where I cannot even interact with the OS for about 30 s. It does not happen on subsequent openings but is still quite disconcerting.

You guys lost me days ago, but I love reading this.

Please continue to share 🙂

3 hours ago, drjdpowell said:

So... did anyone have a 1-on-1 interview with NI?  I've spent some time with NXG over the last week and made multiple comments, though in a private NI forum so I can be completely honest.  Can't tell if anyone from NI has read these comments.

Yes James, I had one with Jeff and one of the dev team from India last week. We had a nice candid chat. He clarified the position that NXG is not really intended for advanced users at this stage.

One of the problems is that NI is now such a vast organisation and everyone is clawing their way up the corporate food chain so there is no real consistency. The issues with the software is always because of the other guy who was in the position previously (my words, not Jeffs). Rinse repeat and now we are 8 years in with a GUI that looked dated three years ago and a UX paradigm that should never have made it out of wireframe design. Sad times indeed.

The juggernaut that is NXG cannot be stopped or even steered at this point it would seem. Almost every single person who has used NXG has said how ugly and drab it looks, but because this goes against NI's "data" our opinions will be ignored.

I will revisit it next year...

1 hour ago, rharmon@sandia.gov said:

Any concern about the double semicolons?

The double semicolons will result in empty array elements in those locations.

3 hours ago, LogMAN said:

2. Split the payload using Delimited String to 1D String Array.vi.

Holy guacamole! When did this make it into vanilla LabVIEW? I have been using the OpenG one for so long now...  it is present in 2019 and not in 2015..

I noticed its opposite number is also now in, nice 🙂

Thanks, I cannot believe I did not see the Data Entry Limits as part of the slider properties! For some reason the DigDisps[] property caught my attention and I thought this was the right place to go poking around. This works (as expected!).

Thanks Jeff, I have sent the calendly link (but I could not find the bit where we pick the Option 1 or Option 2, sorry! I would like to chat about how I use LabVIEW today).

I am struggling with something I would have assumed is trivial.

All I want to do is to be able to programatically set the range of a slider (and also its digital display. I had assumed the digital display would take the same range as the slider but apparently they are separate items.)

Anyway, a simple example is shown here and does not work, the Error 1192 comes from the second property node. The first property node correctly sets the slider range. I guess I am being stupid here, can anyone suggest what is wrong with my code?

Temperature Slider.vi

5 minutes ago, Mefistotelis said:

Oh, I see. From the knowledge I've seen shared, I assumed devs are here.

None of the NI devs come here, this is LAVA after all.  (/ducks)

Everyone is in for a wild ride with NXG.

For extra programming efficiency, speed and consistency the data has shown it is actually better to have two totally different context menus that appear at the same time. Even better, some have pictures, some have text. Take that brain training!

Really looking forward to NXG6.0, we might have 3 different menus!

It's a real shame that more of this stuff is not open to viewing. I often wonder how something is done and try to peek inside the VI. Often it is just a bunch of CLN calls which is fine, I poke around to see what other functions are exported in the DLL but that is about it., I get bored after a short while and have bills to pay so have to move onto real work.

We know if screw with undocumented stuff it will break. No API is perfect, but at least let us see!

The more I think about hooovahh's idea the more I like it.

Maybe I am thinking about this all wrong and should just embrace the dynamic IP address issue. As long as my cRIO can talk to my cloud then it can store its own IP address somewhere in there.

Is this how the IoT hubs work? Like azure IoT?

Thanks everyone for the into. This sounds like the kind of thing that is easy to screw up and I cannot really afford that.

I have got one chance to get my system right, it will be deployed far far away. Does anyone have any recommendations for companies that offer this kind of advice as a (paid for) consultancy? I can do all the LabVIEW development myself but I need good solid advice on choice of hardware and basically IoT related stuff like MQQT and pros and cons of the different IoT platform cloud vendors.

Wow that answer is incredible, so much to digest.

Thank you so much for your insight, I clearly have a huge amount to wrap my head around.