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Archive for the 'LabVIEW' Category

Using XML Data in LabVIEW Just Got Easier

( LabVIEW and JKI and Developer Tools and XML )
As I've mentioned before, using XML data in LabVIEW is way too hard.  And, according to this poll, 7 out of 10 LabVIEW developers think so, too.  LabVIEW's built-in XML schema and support functions are not at all useful for generating and parsing XML schemas defined by others.  And, the various tools available to LabVIEW developers for generating and parsing XML schemas [...]

Monolithic vs. Modular Software Reuse Libraries (Part I)

If you’ve gotten past the horrendously boring title of this article, you probably know a little bit about software reuse libraries.   You probably even contribute to a software reuse library (a personal reuse library or one belonging to your organization).   So, I won’t go into the benefits of code reuse and the pitfalls of reinventing the wheel -- I’ll jump right in and get to [...]

VI Package Manager 1.1 Released

( LabVIEW and JKI and Developer Tools and VIPM )
I'm happy to announce that JKI has shipped the 1.1 release of VI Package Manager , a tool that makes it simple to find, download, and install reusable LabVIEW VIs directly into the functions palette. We're very proud of this release, as it adds an important new feature: configuration management. In this release, [...]

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 [...]

Did National Instruments forget about Virtual Instruments?

It’s been over 20 years now that National Instruments has been refining LabVIEW as a powerful test, measurement, and automation platform, as well as a general purpose graphical data flow programming language. For many years, LabVIEW’s slogan was " the software is the instrument ". NI even named the basic building block […]

Using XML Data in LabVIEW is Hard

( LabVIEW and Rants and XML )
XML, which stands for eXtensible Markup Language, is text-based data format (or language) that is human readable and can be used to create arbitrary data structures.  It is designed to facilitate sharing structured data across many different systems.  Here is a simple example of XML data: <Person Nationality=”US”>   <Name>     <First>John</First>     <Last>Doe</Last>   </Name> </Person> Figure 1 - simple XML data representing a person You’ll […]

LabVIEW Multicore Benchmark Demo

( LabVIEW and multicore )
Here are a couple great photos (courtesy of Joris Robijn) from the NIWeek 2007 keynote*, which show LabVIEW's response to the multicore crisis: The photo on the left shows two quotes, describing the industry's concern with the state of parallel software: "To fully exploit the power of processors working in parallel… new software must deal with the problem [...]

LabVIEW and the Multicore Crisis

Software developers and technologists everywhere are beginning to discuss the looming "multicore crisis".  In a nutshell, this crisis stems from the fact that processors are no longer getting faster due to heat issues; they are just getting cheaper, so, we're putting more of them in a single computer.  Today's multicore processors look like a single chip, but actually have [...]

I couldn’t live without “File>>Locate in Project”

This is another article in a series showing some of my favorite OpenG VIs -- "The OpenG VIs that I couldn't live without". In this article, I'm going to show a very useful tool called the Locate File in Project, which gives you an easy way of finding VIs in the Project Explorer. If you have this tool installed, it will [...]

LabVIEW for Everyone… even 10 year old wiz kids

One of the stars of NIWeek 2007 was a 10 year old wiz kid named Samuel Majors, who is using LabVIEW to automate his model train sets. Samuel was featured during a part of the keynote on Thursday, August 9th titled "Future Scientists and Engineers" (see [...]