Aesthetic modifications to gauges--for dummies?

[Jake of All Trades]

Hello! I'm rather new to all this (and programming in general, really), so please bear with me. What I want to do is to make the simple gauges in LabView look more like, well, this:

Now I have the image files (needle and background) I want to use, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to assign them to a working indicator. I'd actually just be happy changing the needle to my own, but that's what has me flummoxed. When I substitute my needle in (png) in the "customization" panel, it orbits around the gauge instead of rotating about its center. Searching this forum lead me to believe that this is an inherent flaw in the software, but the remedies for it were way over my head. I keep hearing "use XControl", but I have no idea where to start with that... Would anyone be so kind as to give me a bit of a step-by-step? Again, to simplify, I really just want to replace that ugly red triangle than the gauges use as pointers with my own image. Thank you all so much, and my apologies for being such a green-horn!

PS: Oh, and here is my needle design if you're interested:

[LAVA 1.0 Content]

QUOTE(Jake of All Trades @ Jan 23 2008, 11:32 AM)

Hello! I'm rather new to all this (and programming in general, really), so please bear with me. What I want to do is to make the simple gauges in LabView look more like, well, this:

Now I have the image files (needle and background) I want to use, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to assign them to a working indicator. I'd actually just be happy changing the needle to my own, but that's what has me flummoxed. When I substitute my needle in (png) in the "customization" panel, it orbits around the gauge instead of rotating about its center. Searching this forum lead me to believe that this is an inherent flaw in the software, but the remedies for it were way over my head. I keep hearing "use XControl", but I have no idea where to start with that... Would anyone be so kind as to give me a bit of a step-by-step? Again, to simplify, I really just want to replace that ugly red triangle than the gauges use as pointers with my own image. Thank you all so much, and my apologies for being such a green-horn!

PS: Oh, and here is my needle design if you're interested:

Implementing your idea as an XControl is a great suggestion IF you are familiar with XControls since all of the work that goes into making this work complete re-usable. In this case the "work" is not trivial. I do not concider myself qualified to explain how to implement this as an XControl since I am only now learning the details of implementing XControls.

So I will set the idea of an XControl to the side and try to outline how you can get what you are after. Yes, the needle not rotating is concidered a bug and I will not old my breath waiting for NI to fix this bug since it is on the extreme edge of possible use cases.

So the challenges in your request are two-fold Rotating and Over-laying.

In http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=BreakPoint&thread.id=14&jump=true' target="_blank">this thread on the NI-Forums you will find many links to discusions of how to use the Pciture Control. In that thread you will find an example posted by Christian Altenbach that shows you how to rotate an image. If you combine his demo and use the Create Mask VI located on the Picture palette, you should be able to rotate your needle, mask the backround color, and then insert it into a a picture that already has your guage baqckground.

I hope that helps,

Ben

[Mark Balla]

QUOTE(Jake of All Trades @ Jan 23 2008, 10:32 AM)

I really just want to replace that ugly red triangle than the gauges use as pointers with my own image.

You can replace the red triangle with a black arrow form the decorations pallet and it works as expected. Its not exactly what you are looking for but I think is looks better.

http://lavag.org/old_files/monthly_01_2008/post-584-1201201622.png' target="_blank">

I did a xcontrol presentation for a usergroup back in December. the slides and examples can be found at www.nilvug.com