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hooovahh

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hooovahh Experienced

hooovahh

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The content on this page will go away soon. It's currently being migrated.

> New Location <

Read about the wiki here

This thread is intended to be a place for all things LabVIEW to be able to be found. If you have a resource for LabVIEW feel free to reply with your own content. We are interested in things like person blogs, forums, training information, and anything a user of LabVIEW might want.  Several links and sections have been lifted from another resource available over on NI labeled the Content and Communities for LabVIEW Application Development.

I'm New To LabVIEW and Need Help

Basic Training Information

NI Learning Center

NI Getting Started

-Hardware Basics

-MyRIO Project Essentials Guide (lots of good simple circuits with links to youtube demonstrations)

-LabVEW Basics

-DAQ Application Tutorials

-cRIO Developer's Guide

 

Learn NI Training Resource Videos

3 Hour LabVIEW Introduction (Alternate Google Drive)

6 Hour LabVIEW Introduction (Google Drive)
Self Paced training for students
Self Paced training beginner to advanced, SSP Required

Rookie Mistakes in LabVIEW by Digilent

 

State Machine Design Pattern

Beyond Basic Training

These are topics that are useful but not for those new to LabVIEW or software development.  Topics may cover things a novice may have a hard time following.

 

 

I Have Questions

LAVA Forums - Independent community, with less NI oversight, and generally less new users asking basic questions 

NI Official Forums - NI's official forum, monitored semi-regularly by NI and the best place to find official support

LabVIEW on Reddit - Smaller community but has Reddit features like voting on posts and comments causing interesting topics to get more attention 

LabVIEW on Stack Overflow - Q&A style community

 

I'm Looking to Find Example Code and Toolkits

NI Tools Network - Polished released code distributed as VIPM packages.

LAVA Code Repository - Place for Verified, and Unverified code allowing for discussions, in addition to hosting

NI Code Exchange / Community Documents - Similar to LAVA but NI's site licensing means less flexibility if you are posting code and want a custom license.

NI Reference Designs Portal 

GitHub - Trending LabVIEW Projects, and All LabVIEW Projects

GitLab - LabVIEW Projects

BitBucket - LAVA Projects on BitBucket

 

I'm Looking for Blogs

There are lots of LabVIEW blogs, covering lots of topics.  Some blogs go cold after some time, so below is a table of blogs, highlighting the last post made.  At the moment this is updated manually so this will need to be updated periodically.

 

 

I'm Looking for Videos

Similar to blogs, video channels can be hit or miss, and content can become dated.  But if you are more of a visual learner these channels offer a chance to learn by watching others.

Looking For Certification Help

Certification Nugget: CLAD - Certified LabVIEW Associate Developer

Certification Nugget: CLD - Certified LabVIEW Developer

Certification Nugget: CLA - Certified LabVIEW Architect

 

Connecting With Other LabVIEW Developers

 

User Groups

Online communities are a great way to connect and contribute.  In addition to online there are Local LabVIEW User Groups which meet regularly to present and understand LabVIEW and NI topics.  Find one close you you and subscribe or monitor topics.  NI often supports local user groups, but they are in most cases ran and organized by the community.

 

NI Week

NI Week is another great way to connect with and learn.  Hosted in Austin Texas once a year it is a week long conference with training, discussions, keynotes and other activities.  Many previous NI Week videos can be found online but no single source is available which aggregates all marketing, keynotes, and technical sessions in one location.  The best resource for content is a site setup for video hosting done by Mark Balla over the years. 

 

Summits

If you hold a CLA or CLD there are specific summits for you that are free.  These are often tailored presentations for a specific skill set with the focus on technical discussion and problem solving.  There are two CLA summits, one in Austin Texas, and one in Europe both held once a year.  CLD summits happen more frequently and locations change from year to year.  Consult their specific discussion forums on NI to see when the next one is.  Just like NI Week Mark Balla has several videos available here.

 

Needing Professional Help

If a project is getting out of hand and is beyond the skill level of your team, NI suggests looking at one of their Alliance Partners.  Contact one in your area, and they will help try to best guide you on your project.

 

I Want To Contribute to the Community

Developing Code For Others

Arguably the most difficult thing about sharing code, and reusing code, is the mind set and considerations associated with other developers using software you wrote.  It is a type of mental exercise where you need to put yourself in the mind of the developer using your software.  NI's Reference Deign Portal is a good resource for understanding various coding structures, and best practices for designing code for others, and can help with standardizing code for other developers.

 

TBD (Expect this to be a section on various forums, and code repositories that can be added to along with helping out local user groups, and presenting at NI Week and Summits)

 

Other Important Software Topics

 

Source Code Control (SCC)

Recommended SCC for LabVIEW

Software Configuration by NI

Code Management at Center of Excellence

VisualSVN - Free SVN Server Software

Delacor Blog with SCC Category

-SVN Setup for LabVIEW By Delacor (Video)

-Git Setup for LabVIEW By Delacor (Video)

 

SOLID Principals

Agile Software Development Principles, Patterns, and Practices (book)

How Applying Agile Object-Oriented Design Principles Changes Designs and Code by Dmitry

SMoReS development

 

Unit Testing

NI Unit Test Group

 

VI Analyzer (Automated Code Inspection)

The VI Analyzer is a tool by NI that is included with some versions of LabVIEW and allows for automated inspection of LabVIEW software, to check for various conformity or nonconformity to software practices.  The VI Analyzer comes with many useful code checking steps but others can be added.  Checkout the VI Analyzer Enthusiasts for more community made tests.

 

LabVIEW Style Checklist

Center Of Excellence - Learning VI Analyzer

 

LabVIEW Style Guide

Rules to Wire By Part 1

Rules to Wire By Part 2

 

Virtual Machine Usage

TBD

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Christian_L Newbie

Christian_L

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Brian, You may be able to add more features to the forum editor based on comment from Invision, but that should be a larger discussion on LAVA features and security.

https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/443912-editor-direct-html-editing/

Quote

You can enable HTML posting on a group level but this is not recommended for security reasons. There is no BBCode source mode but CKEditor plugins as found at https://ckeditor.com/cke4/addons/plugins/all can also be used and installed via the admin control panel. Do you have any specific usage examples where the editor is making unwanted decisions? If you have encountered any bugs with the editor we will be happy to investigate.

 

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Fab Newbie

Fab

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Excellent work Hooovahh! I hope it is not too much trouble to keep it up to date.

 

I would like to add to the "I'm Looking to Find Example Code and Toolkits" section the NI Reference Designs Portal at http://ni.com/referencedesigns

It is a collection of reference designs that Christian Loew and his team keep updating. It started with only Systems Engineering reference designs, but now it includes several other. 

Thanks for adding the links to the videos we have for source code control, you could also link to our blog SCC category, so as we add new blog posts and videos, the link will be up to date. We have videos for SVN, Hg, and Git: http://delacor.com/category/scc/

Thanks,

Fab 

Edited by hooovahh
Added Delacor SCC Link
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hooovahh Experienced

hooovahh

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15 hours ago, Fab said:

I would like to add to the "I'm Looking to Find Example Code and Toolkits" section the NI Reference Designs Portal at http://ni.com/referencedesigns

It is a collection of reference designs that Christian Loew and his team keep updating. It started with only Systems Engineering reference designs, but now it includes several other. 

I'd argue this should probably go under contributing code, not finding code.  Either that or going under the Beyond Basics Training where more advanced topics are discussed.  I might be wrong but Reference Designs Portal isn't really a place I would see going to find a toolkit, or example on how to do some operation.  It seems more like a place to understand design patterns, and structure code.

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Fab Newbie

Fab

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10 hours ago, hooovahh said:

I'd argue this should probably go under contributing code, not finding code.  Either that or going under the Beyond Basics Training where more advanced topics are discussed.  I might be wrong but Reference Designs Portal isn't really a place I would see going to find a toolkit, or example on how to do some operation.  It seems more like a place to understand design patterns, and structure code.

I will let @Christian_L add to this. I was suggesting to put it in the section looking for code because the Reference Designs already solve lots of problems that people who are starting from scratch might not know about. Instead of reinventing the wheel. The reference designs cover everything from simple libraries, design patterns all the way to complete application architectures. When I teach Advanced Architectures in LabVIEW I point people to this page and I often hear: "why didn't I know about this earlier before I went and reinvented the wheel". 

If you prefer to include it under Beyond Basics Training, that is fine with me, as long as it is included somewhere on the landing page.

Thanks,

Fab

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David_L Newbie

David_L

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I second the Wiki approach.  This allows everyone to easily contribute, without any one person having ownership of having to keep everything updated.  There's way too many sources of content that are created and as soon as the content creator moves on to other projects it gets left in the dust, never to be updated again (I know I've been guilty of this on the NI Community in multiple places).  Do you guys think a wiki like this should be under NI control (more visible and official-looking) or independent (unbiased and community led)?

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hooovahh Experienced

hooovahh

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46 minutes ago, David_L said:

I second the Wiki approach.  This allows everyone to easily contribute, without any one person having ownership of having to keep everything updated.  

To be fair I'm not the only owner of this, any moderator or admin on LAVA can update this as well.  But I get your point.

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David_L Newbie

David_L

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@The Q I don't know how difficult it would be, but I feel like it would be 1000x more effective if the wiki was hosted on lavag itself.  While I agree that a wiki is a good choice, having yet another place to go for LabVIEW content, might fragment the community even more.  

@hooovahh @Michael Aivaliotis Or any other Moderators, Do you guys have any insight if it's possible/easy to add wiki functionality to the Lavag site?

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The Q Rookie

The Q

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Yes, I saw that on the Wikidot one as well.  Abandoned since 2008, right after creating it too.  I sent in a request to have the domain released to me but it looks like it takes Wikidot's Admin a long time to get to those requests.  I even messaged the current owner, but with no reply.  So for now Wikia it is.  I would rather have it hosted on Wikidot, it has better themes (like the standard Wikipedia one everyone is used to).

If LAVA wants to restart the wiki I would support that.

-Sorry @hooovahh I didn't mean to hijack your post.  I really like the Landing Page.  It is pretty much all inclusive.

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hooovahh Experienced

hooovahh

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Despite being on LAVA all the time, my power is quite limited and I believe something like hosting a Wiki here would take more than administrator controls and would need site controls, meaning only Michael would be capable of this.  I don't mind hijacking this thread, as I intend on periodically pruning it (as I've done a little so far) and after some time and discussions die down I'll delete the user posts.  Obviously this would be counter productive to the discussion taking place and I did think about locking this thread from the start but this is fine.  Keep it coming just know that your post maybe deleted after a conclusion has been made on a subject, or your content has been added to the main post.

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David_L Newbie

David_L

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If this page will be the forever "Landing page" then I agree you should delete the posts eventually.  However, now that a wiki exists (whether in it's current place, or back here if Michael figures out a way to add a wiki), my thought was someone (you, me, someone else with free time on their hands) migrate your top post to the wiki and that becomes the forever "Landing page".  That way, again, it's not only up to you to maintain it for eternity, but can evolve through community involvement over time.  

Agree or disagree?

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Michael Aivaliotis Contributor

Michael Aivaliotis

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Where to start. A wiki here a wiki there, everywhere a wiki.

We used to have a section on LAVA which was like a Wiki many many years ago. However, I shut it down. Reasons:

  • Users didn't know it was a Wiki and instead of posting questions to the forum, would create new Wiki pages with their questions. This was a nightmare to moderate.
  • It was setup so that when you created a Wiki page, the discussions for that page, would be linked to dedicated forum threads. Again, more confusion, since it was not a model commonly used elsewhere on the web.
  • The forum\wiki blend was not very intuitive and it made the site hard to "figure out".
  • Nobody cared or understood the wiki. A handful of people used it and never really caught any steam.

After that experiment was shut down, I decided to create a separate domain dedicated to the LabVIEW Wiki. It was labviewwiki.org. I still own this domain. I think this was 2009, I don't recall. But anyway, I used the same open-source software that powered wikipedia, mediawiki. Here's the wiki-index page: https://wikiindex.org/LabVIEW_Wiki. Seems like it had around 300 pages. MediaWiki is super powerful, but not intuitive for new editors. I spent most of the time creating templates and documentation describing how to edit pages. I created a lot of the content but there were some others who added unique content like all the LabVIEW ini keys. All the keyboard shortcuts. All the hidden scripting features (before it was mainstream), etc. It was pretty cool. And yes, we had awesome landing pages and getting started pages that I spend hours and hours crafting. I was young and motivated.

The problem was that we got struck with a rash of spammers. More like bots. They would go through and create hundreds of pages overnight. In that environment, you need moderators and editors to delete the pages and watch for edits. I was the only moderator and admin. So my plate was full. I ended up locking it down and forced it so that you had to have a login account to edit pages. On top of that, the login's had to be manually approved by me to prevent bot accounts. Of course, a wiki cannot be maintained or augmented by one person. The whole point is to have a community edit the pages.

Not sure if Wikia (or MediaWiki) has solved the spamming issue. @The Q, I noticed a lot of the content is scraped from ni.com. Have to be careful about this and copyright claims. One thing I was very careful about with the LabVIEW Wiki I worked on was to create original content as much as possible. Also, what's the point of just duplicating ni.com. That's pointless in my opinion. Google does an excellent job of getting the info you need from multiple sources. But that's my opinion and the community edits should drive that of course.

Sounds like the community wants to reboot the Wiki idea like Hollywood reboots comic book heroes. Sure, let's see where this goes. @The Q seems to be enthusiastic about it. Are there others here willing to put the time and effort into building the content? Any volunteers? If there is some real interest, then I can try to resurrect the old Wiki content and domain (not sure if the content it's salvageable, but I can try). Then we can go from there. I don't have time to admin the site but I can hand over the keys to someone that has more time.

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JKSH Enthusiast

JKSH

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On 27/10/2018 at 10:46 PM, Michael Aivaliotis said:

MediaWiki is super powerful, but not intuitive for new editors.

Recent versions have a WYSIWYG editor.

On 27/10/2018 at 10:46 PM, Michael Aivaliotis said:

The problem was that we got struck with a rash of spammers. More like bots. They would go through and create hundreds of pages overnight. In that environment, you need moderators and editors to delete the pages and watch for edits. I was the only moderator and admin. So my plate was full. I ended up locking it down and forced it so that you had to have a login account to edit pages. On top of that, the login's had to be manually approved by me to prevent bot accounts.

Requiring an account makes sense, especially if you already have an SSO to integrate MediaWiki accounts with forum accounts.

A project I'm in uses the Moderation extension for MediaWiki: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Moderation. It's quite decent; it shows a list of pending edits to be approved/rejected, so the public won't ever see the vandalism and a moderator won't have to waste time reviewing an edit that has already been greenlit by another moderator. Moderators can also mass approve/reject edits by a single account. You can also whitelist certain users so their edits get auto-approved.

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The Q Rookie

The Q

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@Michael Aivaliotis I'm willing to combine efforts.  Wikia is changing its name to FANDOM soon anyways and I didn't know what I wanted to do about that.  Its already changed in all but the URL which will change sometime in 2019 or 2020.

What I really wanted is a place where we could group great content we have already created (or are creating) by topics.  An index of articles so-to-speak.  (More so than maybe what I have already created on the Wikia site.)  Great content is posted everywhere, blogs (company and personal), podcasts, forums (NI and LAVA), etc.  What I would like to see is a place where anyone can post a link to their content, provide a title, synopsis, and some keywords and then this repository would make that searchable by the title, author, and the keywords.  Google won't find everything but it helps (because most of us aren't SEO experts).  I see a lot of reinvention because content can't be found.

I think this is the thing that is needed more than the Wiki.  The Wiki, if there really needs to be one, is a place where people can post articles when the don't have anywhere else to post.

Again, I'm willing to combine efforts here and I will volunteer as a moderator or in whatever capacity you need depending on how this ends up looking.

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Michael Aivaliotis Contributor

Michael Aivaliotis

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Well, the idea behind the original LabVIEW Wiki was to create a Wikipedia for LabVIEW. So linking to external content was welcome, using similar rules as Wikipedia uses. Mainly as cross-reference material or at the bottom of a page where further research could be done. Having said that. A page with all the LabVIEW blogs (which we had before) would definitely be ok. However, creating a dedicated sales page, for example, for your new Modbus toolkit would be forbidden. But a page dedicated to how Modbus works and used in LabVIEW is fine. Where then you could create a section on that page linking to all the Modbus toolkits and code available.

There's a fine line that needs to be walked. The Wiki needs too have a definite purpose. It's ok if that purpose changes. But if it's just left wide open, then it will serve no purpose and be just another dumping ground on the web.

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