jcarmody

[...] (and favourite is British English spelling  ) [...]

I know  .

[...] I still would like to know if such a think is possible in LV - just for knowledge base.

From the AutoIt website:

Also supplied is a combined COM and DLL version of AutoIt called AutoItX that allows you to add the unique features of AutoIt to your own favourite scripting or programming languages!

(Look, they misspelled "favorite"!   ) 

Be careful where you take this argument.  There have been several studies [...]

Arguments based on data from studies conducted in a centrally planned economy don't invalidate my point, they ignore it. 

Typically while debugging, we will be looking to someones code. We will not be really familiar with their naming convention of the State and also the way they organize the states. It will be time consuming and painful to find the states in their state machine. I always felt if there were search in the case selection it would be really useful for quickly navigating the cases. I had to debug very large state machine which had more than >30 cases.

Now I understand.  Stay tuned...

So it's not the healthcare system that's the issue per se, it's the lack of doctors.  That's a pretty common issue irrespective of what country you're in [...]

Lack of supply is a common issue irrespective of what commodity you're talking about, when artificial price controls exist.

New Feature Request:

It will be nice if we can have a search state Control on the top. [...]

It should be easy enough to implement; I've added it to my list.

How many states do you have that you even thought of this?  Do you use the JKI State Machine or state headers?  The tree will separate into sections if your states have headers like "---------- Section ----------".  You can collapse/expand the states under these headers in the CaseSelect window.  This makes it easier to find the state you need.

Regards,

Jim

I have a problem with the concept of a jury of my "peers." Who, exactly, are my peers? My neighbors? Coworkers? College classmates? Correspondents on LAVA? Do any countries use permanent, professional jurors? I wonder how that would work out here.

I remember some comedian had a bit about a person accused of hitting people on the head with a hammer.  The joke was in asking if we really want twelve of his peers in the same room . 

Wow.  This is pretty powerful stuff.  And certainly not what I learned in Civics class in highschool.

I don't want to start another emotionally charged topic, but I'll suggest that that's part of the purpose of public education. 

[...] Do I get dragged off to jail?

It has happened before...

From the original post

William Penn's trial – of the courageous London jury which refused to find him guilty of preaching Quaker religious doctrine (at that time an illegal religion). His jurors stood by their verdict even though held without food, water, or toilet facilities for four days. The jurors were fined and imprisoned for refusing to convict William Penn – until England's highest court acknowledged their right to reject both law and fact and to find a verdict according to conscience. It was exercise of that right in Penn's trial which eventually led to recognition of free speech, freedom of religion, and of peaceable assembly as individual rights.

So, basically, we can't trust the average juror to use their conscience properly?

I'll bite!  I don't trust them.

It doesn't do well with VIs that contain more than one snippet

FWIW, it's fixed.

GetSnippet.llb

In the spirit of the recent popular political threads, I'd like to offer my opinion of something that we can do to effect our system of government. I live in the US; I know that not all of us on LAVA do, so please bear with me (and, don't get me started about voting ). I was prompted to post this after reading a news article of a woman that was arrested for videoing <4 minutes of a birthday party, in a movie theater, and getting some of the movie in the shot.  If her case goes to trial it will likely be before a jury of her peers, and that's the theme for this post.

An article I'd like you to read begins with: 

Is it true or false that when you sit on a jury, you may vote on the verdict according to your own conscience? "True," you say, but then why do most judges tell you that you may consider "only the facts" and that you are not to let your conscience, opinion of the law, or the motives of the defendant affect your decision?

and:

In fact, if you have doubts about the fairness of a law, you have the right and obligation to find someone innocent even though they have actually broken the law!

My favorite quote in the article is:

Despite the courts' refusal to inform jurors of their historical veto power, jury nullification in liquor law trials was a major contributing factor in ending alcohol prohibition. (Today in Kentucky jurors often refuse to convict under the marijuana prohibition laws.)

In order to offer a relevant example I'll explain a certain law that many of us have broken - "honest services fraud".  You can Google it or look here.  Anyway, here's a quote from the link:

Have you ever taken a longer lunch break than what you are supposed to do? Have you ever made a personal phone call at work or done personal business on your employer’s computer? Have you ever had a contract dispute with an employer or a client? All of those things can be criminalized by an enterprising federal prosecutor.

Now, imagine you're seated on a jury for a trial where the defendant is accused of something as ridiculous as these examples.  You will (probably) be instructed by the judge that you must convict if you believe the defendant to be guilty of the charges.  I'd vote to acquit, regardless, and think everybody should but doubt that they would because they don't know their right/obligation. The first article is worth reading. The problem with this attempt at improving the citizenry is that a person would be be rejected as a juror (and perhaps held in contempt) for expressing this belief. I don't have much confidence in our system of justice, but I don't have to be part of the problem. Remember: if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

Is it an integer?  There's no coercion dot at the add function.

Why not?

Let me think about that...  My first thought was "Because it's from a toy!!!".  It might be Ok if my DO can power the servo without any external circuits, I'll have to check. I guess it would be Ok even if I had to wire up a driver circuit. It just feels like a cheap way out of designing a robust system. It certainly would be an inexpensive solution.

Thanks for posting,

Jim

I like this a lot! 

Hi,

I need to select a small motor to feed string into a process.  I've looked at NI's offerings, but they're all rather large and I don't know where to look next.  I need to feed a light cotton wick (about 1/4" diameter) with very little tension so it doesn't need to be large.  I've got a servo motor from my Parallax kit, which I believe I can control with a digital output, but I'm not sure that's a good choice.

Could you suggest hardware I could use and control from my LabVIEW program?  I don't have any experience designing motion control systems but I have programmed using NI Motion drivers.

Thanks,

Jim

It doesn't do well with VIs that contain more than one snippet; it converts the first snippet in the VI and deletes the one you selected. I may fix it by having it convert all snippets rather than only the selected one, but I haven't decided yet.  I'm guessing that we won't often have more than one snippet in a Block Diagram.  Whaddayou think? 

I've posted it here.

I've gotten far enough on my JKI RCF plugin to post it.  Right-click on a snippet, select GetSnippet and it'll replace the decoration with the embedded code. I'd appreciate it if folks would reply with CCT-generated snippets from other versions as I've only tested it with LV 8.6.  I'll work on an 8.2 version this weekend.  Let me know what works and what doesn't and I'll do what I can to make it better.

Special thanks go to Ton and Yair for the CCT, to  Darin.K for showing me how to get snippets from a block diagram and to JKI for the framework. 

GetSnippet.llb

[...] Which leaves me with time on my hands to ponder life, the universe, and everything.[...]

I don't want to ruin your recovery plans, but the answer to that has already been figured out.  It's 42.

Jim

I've begun a RCF plugin that extracts the contents of a snippet made with the Code Capture Tool in LabVIEW 8.6, and it uses some SuperSecret stuff.  Is it Ok if I leave the Block Diagram unlocked?

BTW - this is only useful if folks use the CCT to make snippets in pre-2009 LabVIEW.  Do you think you'll do that?

 never mind

(I get so emotional, baby.)

 Does it make sense to add this to the end of the VI?  Is there a more appropriate way to open a VI for editing?

[...] the snippet is embedded in a 'niVI' chunk preceded by the chunk size. [...]

Thanks.  I actually had studied the vi that embedded the snippet but took the long way around.  It's much prettier now .

GetSnippet.vi

Shouldn't be too hard (yours to try), but the code is embedded inside a PNG tag as a saved VI, just open up and dump like a merge VI.

Here's a LabVIEW 8.6 VI that takes a path to a snippet-embedded PNG file and creates a snippet.vi in the same folder.  I'm not happy with the way I did it; it works, but I have a feeling that there's a more elegant method.  The next thing I'd like to try is to make a JKI RCF plugin that converts a PNG on the BD into code.  It would be nicer to be able to have LabVIEW respond to a PNG being dropped onto the BD; do you know how I might do that?

Hey folks!  This picture is a Snippet made with the Code Capture Tool in LV 8.6!   

GetSnippet.vi

[...] I definitely think you should seriously consider using TestStand.

I purchased a Debug Deployment license for my project.  I will use it, but my TestStand skills today are worse than my LabVIEW skills were two years ago. 

Firstly, there's a difference between a state machine and a sequence machine.

Please help me better understand the distinction.  I use macros for sequencing tests and operations that make up a test, but the sequences can branch depending upon how the UUT responds.  I call it a State Machine...

TestStand

So, instead of having a large State Machine I'll have a large list of subsequences?  That's feels better but I can't explain why.

I think I'll use it, but it'll be for the built-in reporting and data storage and not because it's more readable.  What else will I gain that addresses the issues folks have with my old kind of State Machine?