Thinking in G

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The JKI State Machine makes its public debut

I’m very happy to announce that JKI has released the JKI State Machine™ to the public as a free download.  This is the very same template that is used by the JKI team, nearly every day, in our products and various projects.

This tool is the direct result of putting some of the best LabVIEW minds [...]

Planning for software reuse is easy — mining is hard

One of the best places to find reusable code is in your old projects.  However, “mining” your old projects for “reuse gems” (sorting through every VI, looking for sparkly little gems of general-purpose code that have immense value) is simply not an effective use of time or energy.

For example, if you were a miner looking [...]

What’s that .lvlps file next to my LabVIEW 8.6 project?

I’m lucky enough to have a new project that will be developed in LabVIEW 8.6, so I get to use various new features (like Darren’s awesome Quick Drop tool).
When jumping head first into a new LabVIEW version there are bound to be some unknowns.  In my case, I noticed that, after saving my project (.lvproj) [...]

LabVIEW 8.6 Quick Drop is awesome (and an unfair advantage)!

I’m lucky enough to have a new project that will be developed in LabVIEW 8.6 (which was just released at NIWeek 2008), so I get to start using various new features like Darren’s totaly awesome Quick Drop tool.  I’m really excited to start using Quick Drop, because I saw Darren (the LabVIEW R&D team member [...]

LabVIEW 8.5 Feature – For Loop Conditional Terminal

One of the great new features in LabVIEW 8.5 is the addition of an optional Conditional Terminal on the For Loop structure.  This allows you to easily "break" out of the For Loop, when an exit condition occurs. (In fact, text based programming languages often let you use the "break" command to exit a For Loop.) In the screenshot below, you can see [...]

Customizing the LabVIEW Palettes is (Ridiculously) Hard

Have you ever tried editing the LabVIEW palettes in order to integrate your reusable VIs into LabVIEW?  If you have then you've undoubtedly experienced the frustration of finding your VIs missing from your custom palettes, at some point. Maybe you didn't realize one of the following facts about *.mnu files: Tip: you can skip over this list, because it's probably completely [...]

The Diagram Disable Structure causes bugs

One LabVIEW features that I both love and hate is the Diagram Disable Structure.  I love the fact that you can comment out code, especially broken or stub (unfinished) code.  However, I hate the fact that output tunnels of the Diagram Disable Structure are set to "Use Default if Unwired", because it causes buggy code.  Here's an example... Let's say that we [...]

In Place Element Strucure – Saves Time and Prevents Bugs

The designers of LabVIEW added a new function to LabVIEW 8.5 called the In Place Element Structure . The idea behind this structure is that it allows memory efficient operations on sub-elements of compound data structures like Clusters, Arrays, Variants, and Waveforms. However, it also [...]

Functional Globals in LabVIEW 8.5 – No Loop, No Joke

As an April fools day joke this year, I posted a VI on LAVA that shows an implementation of a Functional Global that appears to not have any While Loop or For Loop around the Feedback Node. This trick was accomplished by making the While Loop very large (extending beyond the visible region of the [...]

LabVIEW tip: easy unit conversion

Recently, I wrote a short article on easy relative timestamp calculations, showing how to use LabVIEW’s built in units feature to easily add relative times to timestamps. Now, I want to show you another very useful technique that every LabVIEW developer should know — how to harness the built-in unit conversion capabilities of LabVIEW [...]