Let floating point numeric probes by default display all/more digits

[Jeffrey Habets]

I've submitted this to NI's product suggestion.

Let floating point numeric probes by default display all digits of precision for that particular data type.

In a recent project I've spend hours and hours looking for a bug of which it wasn't directly obvious to me that it was caused by the floating point lsb rounding errors because these are basically masked by the default setting of 6 significant digits. I think this is a good default for FP-controls, but not for probes which are used for debugging purposes. In my case it would have saved me tons of time.

Now, I imagine it is not always wanted behavior to have full precision in a probe, so best thing would probably be to have a control on the probe FP to set the nr of digits of precision at runtime. I can create a custom probe for that, so my problem is solved, but it would be nice to have this available on the default probe. I imagine more people are caught by this 'problem'.

[Aristos Queue]

If the generic probe did that, there would be riots over it taking up too much screen space. We created custom probes so that everyone could build what they needed/wanted/can't believe LV R&D didn't give them.

[Jeffrey Habets]

QUOTE (Aristos Queue @ Oct 5 2008, 08:47 PM)

If the generic probe did that, there would be riots over it taking up too much screen space. We created custom probes so that everyone could build what they needed/wanted/can't believe LV R&D didn't give them.

It's a good thing that we have the custom probes.. And I have them on my own system, but often I'm debugging on a client's system and I'll have to do with the default probes. Imho, having the custom probes should not mean the generic probes don't have to evolve further with new versions of LV. Things like having the radix visible/setable and basic formatting should be available in the generic probes. The probe window doesn't have to be as big as in my example (I just used the conditional probe as an example), so screen real-estate isn't a problem here.

[Yair]

I agree with Stephen, but there's a simple middle path - NI can simply put an intern on it and ship more custom probes with LabVIEW (like Darren's history probes, which can be very useful). The UI for selecting probes is simple enough once you know it's there.