Neil Pate

Not directly answering your question but I would say the biggest favour you can do yourself is not use tabs, subpanels are your friend here.,

To answer your question, I know that in the past LabVIEW's "cleverness" sometimes caused bugs with charts where data would just not be present on the indicator if was not visible, but I would not bother about unloading panels.

Nope, only NI RIO hardware.

Craig, it's not like they took features out of LabVIEW when they introduced LVOOP did they?

Wow, a lot of work has gone into this! Nice toolkit Q.

I have never been a big fan of XControls as they just have too many weird issues.

Thanks James. I have tried everything and cannot seem to recreate it. Don't really need to just now it is bugging me! :-)

I am looking through some RT code, and am a bit confused by the following node. Can anybody tell me how I would make the node with the "chip" icon on it? The VI with this in in under the RT CompactRIO target folder in the project.

I am pretty sure this has something to do with Scan mode on the FPGA or shared variables or user-defined variables, however I am not very familiar with any of these.

Any ideas? 

Edit: the C-Series module that this node refers to is currently tucked away under my FPGA Target, so perhaps this is old test code from when the module was used in Scan mode? If I move the modue out from the FPGA to just under the chassis the little glyph looks different, like a  little blue square wave with a triangular wave just about it.

21 minutes ago, hooovahh said:

Using the Variant to data, turn it into an array of variants.  If it returns no error, then your input is either an array, or a cluster.

Bingo! Seems to work. I think all my clusters will be properly named as they will come from my code, it is only the arrays which come from the OPC-UA toolkit that may have this problem. 

This is all part of my master-plan (insert evil voice) to use a variant repository for my across-loop data sharing experiement. Currently I am making a nice tree viewer for the variant attributes (kinda like Ton's XControl) and mostly based on this.

2 minutes ago, hooovahh said:

How did you end up with an array that thinks it is a variant? 

Courtesy of the OPC-UA API that comes with the DSC toolkit.

I did try to check for a variant in a variant, but it seemed to keep going down the rabbit hole. I will try the variant to array of variants I do use this elsewhere.

At the moment this is getting me out of jail, but it feels wrong on so many levels. The OPC-UA toolkit kindly tells me what the data type is, it just does not bother putting that into the variant.

I have a variant, for some reason it does not seem to have it's type information inside, the variant thinks it contains a variant (which I don't believe it does). I cannot do anything about this, this is how it is being handed to me.

Does anybody know how I can retrieve the original data type? (do not really need to know specifics of SGL or DBL etc, just want to know it is an array).

In the example attached I know this particular variant is an SGL array, so the Variant-->Data works fine as I have manually put in the type. However I am expecting various different array types.

Variant Trouble.vi

Just for anybody interested.

Courtesy of our friends at GPower (4th link on google, impressive!) 

http://www.gpower.as/downloads/bsd-license-explained

I would be pretty hesitant at trying to run mathscript nodes at anywhere near this rate. Not that I have tried to do it, just gut feeling tells me it would end badly.

Marc, that thread you linked to regarding cRIO performance is very interesting, pity there was no real answer from NI other than buy the new controller :-(

TimA I like your avatar :-)

6 hours ago, bbean said:

Is the Variant Tree indicator available in the Dev environment?  Not sure I remember correctly, but I thought after looking into using it in a program I found the primitive only ran if it was a probe.

Ditto to what the others have said. I have not yet tried building my application but just dropping the XControl down on the FP works almost as expected. One minor thing which I have not investigated the reason for yet is that you cannot resize the tree column widths.

I am probably going to modify it a bit as I want to actually use it as a GUI component and I don't want it displaying the text "Attributes" and a few other things.

Thanks, I am now experimenting with using a variant to store quite all of my global system data, and this tree is a really neat way to show everything (for debug/dev purposes).

I would have had exactly the same bug, so I have updated my package with your fix.

I thought it might be (I do have it installed), but it behaves much nicer than any XControl I have come across (no usual edit time strangeness I am used to with XControls), and is that not a Probe?

OK, done some digging, seems like it definitely this. Thanks James (and Ton and Brian)

OK, so this seems to be native behaviour of variants with attributes, but how did you create the Variant Tree control?

What magic is this that allows a variant to be displayed as a tree? Or am I just being really dense after a long week?

I also used LabSQL when I did not have access to the NI toolkit, this was many years ago.

5 hours ago, smithd said:

Oh...no. I mean NI System Configuration API, for managing software etc. on RT targets and in theory doing other stuff with hardware but people who really use it for this totally get 100 pts extra credit. Very creative name obviously, and the shortened form is nisyscfg: http://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/373107E-01/nisyscfg/software_subpalette/

Basically everything is synchronous and everything totally ignores its timeout. To quote the help:

connect timeout in ms specifies the time in milliseconds that the VI waits before the operation times out. The default is 4000 ms (4 s). In some cases, this operation may take longer to complete.

*by 'some cases' they mean 'pretty much all cases' and by 'longer' they mean 'go fetch a snack'.

 

You mean the same System Configuration API where changing the time could cause a hard-crash of the cRIO. Yes lovely stuff that.

23 minutes ago, hooovahh said:

You can still perform a Find All Instances of a particular VI, which is probably more useful because you will only find the VI for a particular method call of a FGV, instead of finding every instance.  I believe what you are asking is if you can search for the polymorphic VI, to which I believe the answer is no, you can only search for members of the polymorphic VI, which in this case would be a particular method.

No, I am asking for the first scenario. Good to know it can be done.

I have never really found the necessity to create polymorphic VIs, individual wrapped API VIs was sufficient for me in the past.

33 minutes ago, hooovahh said:

Yeah I like this idea and made a (half complete) tool for generating these polymorphic VIs from FGV, posted over here.

If you have something going wrong with your code, and you know it is one of the particular methods of the AE then (that have wrapped been wrapped so as to not expose the enum and all controls), you can easily just search for that particular VI in your code.

I was under the impression you could not do this with a polymorphic VI?

3 hours ago, drjdpowell said:

Variants don’t “flatten”.  Putting something in a variant doesn’t involve altering or copying the data.  They have overhead but I don’t think the size of the data matters.

Really? I did not know this, always suspected there was something special about variants. Now I am even more glad I use variants as my message data 

Getting there slowly.. :-)

I have the 16-bit x 16-bit multiplication working using the 8-bit hardware multiplier.

Also I have fleshed out my LabVIEW demo to show how to solve the rest of my problem.

Convert (+,16,4) Fixed Point Number To String.vi

Convert First Decimal Place Of (+,16,4) Fixed Point Number To String.vi

Fixed Point Maths.vi

Guys you are killing my thread :-)

An Action Engine is not a process (actor, whatever we want to call it). Nobody actually said it was either!

I just wanted to know if people still have a use for Action Engines (enough so to actually make one) these days.

Can you interact with Word (using ActiveX) and save as a text file? Then you can read the text file as pure bytes and interpret as UTF-8. I have done something similar whereby I allow a GUI to be translated "on-the-fly" into different languages, stored as UTF-8 text files.