Archive for the ‘LabVIEW’ Category
Needle in the Haystack
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Finding the best answer is not always straightforward. Scientists are not programmers. Repeat that after me: scientists are not programmers. It’s not their fault; it’s just a lack of proper training. If you are implementing some algorithm given you by a scientist, it’s important to
Beware Simplicity
Simpler ≠ faster : you still have to know what happens “under the hood”. If you read the post about en masse operations, you might remember that I pointed out that you should know what is happening behind the scenes. Here is a particular case
Terminator 2: the Sequel
Make sure that quitting time is followed by happy hour. As mentioned earlier, a compiled LabVIEW application behaves similarly to the development system when terminating. Namely, it leaves the main window on the screen, waiting for you to close it. That’s handy in the DevSys,
Virtual Devices
When you don’t have the DAQ hardware you need… Any version of NI-DAQ and the Measurement and Automation Explorer (MAX) released recently has provisions for “simulated” devices. You choose which devices you want, and then NI-DAQ will pretend those devices are actually installed on your
Writing Non-Fragile Code
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,
Watch your step
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
The Next Step in TCP-IP
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
Speed of En Masse Operations
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
Keeping your charts up to date
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
An Improved Analog Clock
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
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