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Phillip Brooks

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Everything posted by Phillip Brooks

  1. I recently installed the LabVIEW Version 7.1.1 for Windows 2000/NT/XP -- Patch and have been experimenting with dotNET 2.0. I first installed the 7.1.1 update, mass-compiled, then installed the 'f2' patch. These installs replaced the original files in my 7.1 installation directory. Everything works fine. Now.... I'm about to start work on a project with others using LV 7.1 from the original CDs installed. Does the 7.1.1 version change the VI versions? Would my VIs created in 7.1.1 be compatible with 7.1, or will I need to revert. It's not a problem to revert, I'd just like to save myself the trouble....
  2. The online CLAD example test is a very good approximation of the actual test. I've started looking into the CLD test, and noticed a restriction related to your question in the document "Certified LabVIEW Developer Requirements and Conditions". Confidentiality of Examination Materials: All certification examination materials are National Instruments Confidential. You agree to not disclose either the content or intent of examination items regardless of your certification status. NI does offer a CLD Test prep course on line; I'm trying to decide when to take it. I was told at the NI Symposium last fall that anyone who completed the CLAD test before the end of the year would qualify to take this prep course free of charge. Good luck with the test! :thumbup:
  3. Types of people Those who overuse control references would be control nuts. Those who use excessive global and local references would be schizophrenic. Those who place clusters in clusters in clusters would be organizational freaks. Those who place wires with no more than two vertical and two horizontal legs would be anal retentive. Those who use LLBs would be just plain crazy. Did I leave anything out :question:
  4. Intelligent Globals = Action Engine? When I started working at my current job, all the LV'ers kept talking about Action Engines. I Googled, found little or nothing. The first result while Googling LabVIEW "Action Engine" today ( 10 Jan 06 ) points to my own question to the LAVA Forum about Action Engines! :laugh: The only other place I've seen the term mentioned is in some NI Forum postings by "Ben". I agree that a functional global by definition should simply store and return data. Maybe in the spirit of the discussion and considering LV 8, they should be called UNshared Variables? :laugh: Does anyone else like the term "Action Engine"?
  5. WHAT ARE SINGLE AND DUAL LINKS ? Wikipedia Just reading this over lunch; The video card needs 850 Watts of power to run !!!!! Guess that leaves laptop computing out of the question... http://www.legitreviews.com/article/285/2/
  6. What is Microsoft .NET? Microsoft .NET is the Microsoft strategy for connecting systems, information, and devices through Web services so people can collaborate and communicate more effectively. .NET technology is integrated throughout Microsoft products, providing the capability to quickly build, deploy, manage, and use connected, security-enhanced solutions through the use of Web services. LabVIEW already has various methods for connecting systems and sharing information; VI Server, Shared Variables, OPC, etc... I've been looking at .NET in my spare time. There are numerous collections related to the OS that can be called in a much simpler method than in the past. An example would be calculating an MD5 hash for a particular file. MD5 is often used to validate a file for execution or download into a piece of hardware. I recently read about .NET support for MD5, had a project that could benefit from this sort of check, and had also just downloaded LabVIEW 8 from the NI web site. I put together a few LV .NET nodes, and could calculate the MD5 for the LV8 454MB file in under a minute. Could it be done natively from within LabVIEW? Of course! Selecting how an where to perform a calculation is a design choice. If I used LabVIEW for LINUX, I would likely use a 'md5sum' function call to the OS rather than writing it myself in LabVIEW. If I implimented the MD5 algorithm myself and did it incorrectly, I might have a problem regardless of which platform I used. In general, .NET is not of great value from the traditional Aquire, Analyze, Present standpoint of LabVIEW. .NET offers easier access to the OS, rather than having to Google "win32.dll" and "wininet.dll" and create Call Library Function nodes that will fail and crash your LabVIEW session. My .NET MD5 programming example I've also started reading this blog; Lycangeek - And now a word from Brian Tyler. Brian heads up the .NET development for LabVIEW at NI.
  7. With a desktop this large, I could create larger block diagrams and obfuscate my code to the point where only I could edit it. Requires a dual-link DVI-D graphics card that supports WQXGA (2560x1600) resolution. Add the needed graphics card and you're over the price of a LabVIEW Full Dev. license! I guess I'll have to wait until next year, maybe Santa can negotiate a volume discount...
  8. Using GPIB instruments? If you're working with GPIB based equipment, you can use the event registers if your instrument impliments it correctly. Using Service Requests in your GPIB application
  9. Has anyone ever used the Lego products with LabVIEW? The new NXT controller makes this look like I would try this out. New LEGO MINDSTORMS Software to Be Powered by National Instruments LabVIEW Lego Mindstorm NXT robots are smarter and stronger than ever!
  10. 1 GPIB device with 2 PCs I've used the ICS Electronics 4842 to share an 8 1/2 digit DMM between two computers. I bought mine on EBay for ~$100; I think they cost quite a bit more than that retail though... http://www.icselect.com/gpib_extdr_ds.html#sw I saw one today on EBay
  11. I agree with your observations, and wasn't aware of the change to allow NI-VISA distribution with a compiled application. I always use some sort of NI hardware (GPIB, etc) so licensing has never been an issue for me. I remembered complaints by LV developers who use serial interfaces, and after reading about the SerialPort class in .NET 2.0 put 2 and 2 together, got 5 , and thought to ask the question. I did revisit the M$ site and checked the OS support for .NET 2.0. Supported Operating Systems: Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 Windows 98 Windows 98 Second Edition Windows ME Windows Server 2003 Windows XP Service Pack 2 That doesn't mean it will PERFORM, but it SHOULD at least work. The later versions of NI-VISA only support NT, 2000 and XP. The .NET download is ~22 MB, and required available disk space is listed as 280 MB. The NI-MAX download is ~15 MB, the MAX folder on my PC is ~201 MB. I noticed that NI makes reference to an open source project called Mono that intends to offer .NET support for Linux and Mac; but I don't understand how it would be called from LabVIEW.
  12. I've been playing with .NET in my spare time, The list of new features in the .NET framework v 2.0. includes a SerialPort class. I've read about some people being dissapointed with having to use VISA in order to access Serial devices; could this new .NET class be used to create a replacement for the old Serial Read/Write functions? Simple example of Serial I/O using C#.NET What's Playing? From MS Coding4Fun
  13. Your problem seems to be more of configuration management one. If your LabVIEW stations are "instruments" then you want to treat them as such. I've used many traditional instruments where firmware and even OS updates (Agilent scopes) were regularly released, but I didn't because of dependancies and configuration management. Don't treat the instrument station as simply another PC on the network. Don't take crap from the IS department. They will likely say "It's a PC, it's on the network, and the company policy is yada, yada, yada... We own it, and it MUST have Netscape, TimeKeeper+ 2000 and the AutoChron Super Backup service running..." Don't install MS-Office, Norton AV, Firefox, or AOL IM. Don't use the instrument station for non-instrument functions like timeclocking or a print server. Disable Windows sharing, Windows Update, telnet, ftp and all the other unneeded services. Store your data directly on a server and access the results from there. If your IS department can't help you do this, point it out to the IT manager! To reduce the possibility of viruses, your instrument stations could be placed on a private LAN. The account(s) used by operators would not have admin priviledges. They could be further physically secured by removing floppy drives, disabling USB (disables removable media) and disconnecting the optical drive from the computer's bus. You might say "Hey, now it's hard for me to update or work on the instrument station. How do I load, debug, etc..." You will have problems with Linux, LVRT etc. The difference is that you won't have to support new OSs, manage LV licenses for different platforms or learn how to relink a kernel!
  14. Copied from Info-LabVIEW posting, 29 Sept 2005: The deluge of thank-you notes and kind expressions that we have received since announcing the LabVIEW Technical Resource's last issue is greatly appreciated. The success of LTR during our 12 years of publication has been due to the great support from the LabVIEW community -- technical reviewers, authors, and customers. We want to express our appreciation to the LabVIEW community. The difficult decision to end production of LTR was not for profitability reasons, as has been speculated, but rather for rate of return reasons. Historically, applying these same resources and assets to other business/product lines that we own has resulted in higher rates of return. There has also been some speculation as to whether this publication should convert from print to electronic. LTR successfully converted some of its international product lines to fully electronic versions several years ago. However, the true cost of production of LTR product lines is not in the printing costs, but rather in the editorial, testing, and quality control effort to provide quality, applicable material that supports all platforms and LabVIEW versions. Those that have submitted articles know of the editing, review, and software testing cycles that goes on to provide technically accurate and applicable articles An idea was proposed on the Info-labview site that LTR should be included in the SSP package. We have discussed this type of value-added addition to the SSP program and other ideas with National Instruments over the years. However, other than successful pilot programs with a few international SSP programs, the idea was never formally adopted. As far as the future of the LTR Publishing business, two larger publication houses have expressed interest in buying our assets. We chose to stop publication efforts as we work toward this transition. There is no guarantee at this time that the content will stay LabVIEW based. It is possible our order fulfillment and production processes will be purchased for use with other content. It has been a great opportunity to work with the LabVIEW community - a passionate group generous with their time. We're proud to have supported the LabVIEW community and run a successful business for 12 years. Thank you again for the outstanding community support. Karen Pape Managing Editor LabVIEW Technical Resource 860 Avenue F Suite 100 Plano, TX 75074 Phone: 214-706-0587 x104 Fax: (214) 706-0506
  15. Under the LabVIEW Help menu, select "Search the LabVIEW Bookshelf" Select LabVIEW Development Guidlines, or view on-line at: http://www.ni.com/pdf/manuals/321393d.pdf Other style info: From Bloomy Controls: Five Techniques for Better LabVIEW Code
  16. You're welcome... There was a question about GUIDs on Info-LabVIEW. See attached... I tried to create a quick .NET version; Place a .NET Refnum on your front panel. Associate the Refnum with the class System.Guid You will find this by browsing and selecting the file mscorlib.dll. On my XP machine the path was C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\mscorlib.dll Invoke the method NewGuid, then pass the NewGuid Refnum and invoke ToString. As always, clean up your references by closing them. From what I've read, this implementation may use a hardware specific value (network MAC address?) as a seed for the GUID. http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/mono-lis...ary/003109.html Download File:post-949-1133787439.vi
  17. I was looking for a method to validate large files in LabVIEW. The NI MD5.LLB source required passing a string which is not practical for a multi-megabyte file. I researched the .NET MD5 functionality, and put together this VI (LV Version 7.1). The .NET implementation is quite simple. I tested this VI against the labview_80.exe download (~450MB) and FastSum 1.3 Standard and was able to verify my download; see Download LabVIEW 8.0 Now! thread... FastSum took over a minute to run, the .NET calc called from LabVIEW took ~ 30 seconds... Enjoy! Download File:post-949-1133361444.zip
  18. Subset of NI icons in your local installation: Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 7.1\examples\instr\insticon.llb\Icon256.vi More on line at: http://www.ni.com/devzone/idnet/library/ic...rt_glossary.htm One trick I recently learned from this forum is to select a region inside your icon and then executing paste. The graphic will be scaled from the clipboard to fit your selected region. I've been opening MS-Word, finding something I like in the clipart gallery, copying and pasting it into my LV icons. There are recurring styles for some of the MS clipart that makes things look consistent, and I've even gotten some compliments :thumbup: for taking so much time to make meaningful icons!
  19. I ran the VI on my computer, then made the changes Louis suggested, and saw similar improvements. I watch the NI Developer Zone RSS feeds and read "Optimizing LabVIEW Embedded Applications" and shaved some additional time off by following the advice to "use shift registers instead of loop tunnels for large arrays." When passing a large array through a loop tunnel, the original value must be copied into the array location at the beginning of each iteration, which can be expensive. The shift register does not perform this copy operation, but make sure to wire in the left shift register to the right if you don
  20. I often change the display properties of front panel controls. For example, I hide the labels and display the captions or set the caption to bold text. If I multiselect (SHIFT+select) a group of objects, and want to apply a single (common) property, the change is only applied to the last selected object. I understand that not all FP items have the same properties, but there are SOME common properties for the class "Control". Individually selecting and setting properties is very tedious.
  21. NI Toolkits?! What are those! I haven't yet worked for an employer that would pay the price for these :2cents: I long ago wrote my own interface to ADO, and have never been involved in PDA, imaging or FPGA development. In the consulting world, I'm sure that these tools pay for themselves quickly. Thanks for the insight.
  22. See the online help: Generate Occurence Details Note National Instruments encourages you to use the Notifier Operations functions in place of occurrences for most operations.
  23. Nice palletes :camera: ! Some of them look familiar, but some look very INTERESTING!
  24. :thumbup: That was the trick, thanks Michael! :worship: I sometimes get worried about going "outside the box" with all of the layers; VISA, DAQ, MAX, etc... It was nice to find that LabVIEW is forgiving outside of the development environment too. I've been burned too many times by adding modules/drivers in other languages only to break something else...
  25. Sorry to those who surf other boards as well; I'm in a crunch and can't figure out what to do. The more eyes, the better... I'm trying to upgrade an installation of LV6.1 to use the application builder. The computer was already built and had NI MAX 3.1 and NIDAQ 6.x.x installed. When I do a custom install to select only the Application Builder, the 6.1 Installer indicates that I have a later version of MAX and NIDAQ, and that it will replace MAX and NIDAQ with older versions. I can't "unselect" this! I don't want to change these; I've spent 3 months developing with the 3.1 and 6.x.x and can't afford to break my code now. How can I install the 6.1 App Builder WITHOUT touching MAX and NIDAQ?! Why does the LV Installer insist on replacing things that should not matter?!
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