Application to run from a Memory Stick

[jbrohan]

Some preliminary investigation shows that it seems to be possible to load an LV application and the run time (and all its friends) onto a Memory stick. The initial requirement comes from a picture processing program which needs to be run on home and office computers accessing the same private image collection (on the memory stick).

The implementation seems sensitive to the location of the files. For example Sliders do not have frames and buttons are not visible unless the 'models' folder is in the right place. Does anyone know of the paths information which runs this kind of thing? For example the installation on a clean computer puts the lvrt in a subfolder of a folder National Instrumetns in C:\program files; can I make it go somewhere else?

John

[Yair]

I haven't had much experience with it, but I have done running an LV exe directly from a USB flash drive with the RTE files on it. If I remember correctly, it involved copying the RT folder and the exe into a "bin" folder on the stick and setting up the autorun dialog to display my application as the default option (that was the closest I could come to autorun). This was with LV 7.0, 8.x might be more problematic.

I think I might still have the documentation I wrote for how to do this, and if you want I can search for it in a few days.

[jbrohan]

Thanks Yen

Knowledge that it can be done is most helpful

Is it still being used? What would help a lot is a map of the folder structure of your memory stick, maybe an old fahsioned dos E:/>dir /s > a.txt and then post or mail me the file a.txt.

Do you know if it is sensitive to the Operating System?

John

[Yair]

My only experience with this has been with LV 7.0 on Windows XP. As mentioned on Info-LV, later versions are more problematic.

What I did was this:

1. Copy the National Instruments\Shared\LabVIEW Run-Time\7.0 folder to the drive and rename it "Bin".
   
2. Place the EXE file in it as well.
   
3. Place the icon you want for the drive in the root (if you want one)
   
4. Place the attached Autorun.inf file in the root (remove the VI extension, it was only needed for uploading) and edit it to have the proper values. Everything in curly braces should be replaced.
   I think you can remove some of those entries, but I haven't found the point.
   

Unfortunately, most flash drives do not support whatever is needed to do proper autorun, so the best you can have is that your application will appear as the default application in the menu that comes up when you plug the drive in. You might be able to get each computer to use it automatically after the first time by using the check mark which usually appears for doing this.