Archive for the ‘LabVIEW’ Category
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 Posted in Beginners, Easier Programming, LabVIEW
Oooops…. who broke it?
“Fragile” code is code that breaks in one place because of changes you make in some other place. It’s most aggravating when you’re due to ship a new version tomorrow and you need to make one last tweak at 11:30 PM, or

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 Posted in Beginners, Easier Programming, LabVIEW
But who’s watching the watchers?
Some development environments have a concept called “watching”, where you choose a variable to watch and you see a continuous display of that variable in some window. This is very useful during debugging, as you can step through your program and

Saturday, September 12th, 2009 Posted in Beginners, LabVIEW, TCP
Several conversations at once
A question came up on the LabVIEW forum the other day about multiple connections, and how hard it was to have two connections transmitting at two different rates. This surprised me a bit, because I have been doing just that for quite

Friday, September 11th, 2009 Posted in Beginners, LabVIEW, Timing
Zip-zap-zowee and swoosh!
Just in case you thought I was kidding in the article on en masse operations, I decided to offer some proof of the speed advantages they can give you.
I used the Timing Template vi to measure the time it takes to multiply an

Saturday, September 5th, 2009 Posted in LabVIEW, Tips & Tricks, User Interface
Use your chart to indicate time of day.
LabVIEW charts, out of the box, don’t lend themselves to displaying the actual time of day. By default they give you 1024 history points and a visible scale of 0-100 so what you see is in terms of

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 Posted in LabVIEW, Timing, Tips & Tricks, User Interface
Sometimes all that digital stuff is just too bland.
A bug undocumented feature of the original analog clock was that the markers on the scale were at intervals of 1.25 seconds, a consequence of LabVIEW preferring to use 4 intervals per major tick, when we silly humans

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 Posted in Beginners, Data Handling, Easier Programming, LabVIEW
The things that I used to do…
En masse is a French term meaning “as a whole” or “all together”; treating a group of something as a single unit. LabVIEW has the ability to treat arrays this way, which can greatly reduce your workload. If

Sunday, July 5th, 2009 Posted in Data Handling, LabVIEW, Timing
Can’t you signals just work together?
Usually, in a data acquisition program, all the signals you measure are “live”, meaning they represent the current conditions at the time they are sampled. However, in some cases you might have some signals which are not live, but delayed.

Friday, June 5th, 2009 Posted in Beginners, Easier Programming, LabVIEW
The types, they are a-changin’
LabVIEW beginners often either don’t know about type definitions, or don’t appreciate their value. This article will attempt to explain their use and how they can save you boatloads of time and effort.
Suppose you have a cluster of items that’s very

Thursday, May 7th, 2009 Posted in LabVIEW, Timing, User Interface
Sometimes all that digital stuff is just too bland.
If you want to display a time-of-day clock in LabVIEW, it takes three seconds to plop down a TIMESTAMP indicator, and 10 more seconds to enter ADVANCED EDITING mode, and skip the month, day and year, and
