Buying LabVIEW abroad
Hi folks, Here in the UK, the Full version of LabVIEW costs 1685 UK pounds. In the US, it costs $1995, = c. 1100 UKP at the prevailing exchange rate. Even supposing we have to add VAT at the prevailing UK rate, this only takes the price up to c. 1300 UKP. So, is there any reason at all why I can't buy LabVIEW in the US and use it in the UK? I'm sure the marketeers at NI have some reasons they trot out in response to such enquiries, but seriously - why not? Anyone in the UK (or anywhere else in the world with a favourable exchange rate) done this? Any problems? Simon Simon Whitaker [EMAIL PROTECTED] Head of Software Development, Tiab Ltd tel: +44 (0)1295 714046 fax: +44 (0)1295 712334 web: http://www.tiab.co.uk/
Running two copies of VI and seeing two FPs
Hi folks, I'm trying to get a VI set up so that it can have more than one open FP available at once. It's a log viewer and I'd like to be able to have two instances running side-by-side, with a different log file loaded into each one. Setting the VI to reentrant doesn't appear to be the complete solution. This must be a fairly common problem, and I'd be interested to hear from anyone who's managed to solve it. Cheers, Simon Simon Whitaker [EMAIL PROTECTED] Head of Software Development, Tiab Ltd tel: +44 (0)1295 714046 fax: +44 (0)1295 712334 web: http://www.tiab.co.uk/
Re: Buying LabVIEW abroad
On Sun, 04 Apr 2004 10:46:02 -0500 Greg McKaskle wrote: The cost differences in the products are largely due to the cost of running the sales and support offices in the UK or country where the product is being sold. You purchased not only the SW, but also the phone support in your time zone and language. If you need to speak with an engineer before sales or have someone visit your site you do have a number to contact. Greg, As you're no doubt aware, NI no longer offer their customers phone support, unless we sign up to their new software subscription service. If I remove support from the equation it appears that we're being stung for an extra 50% on cost just so that we can buy software from the UK. This doesn't sound like great value for money to me! I'd gladly buy the software online at the prevailing US dollar rate and download it. Lots of vendors sell software this way, and I'd like to think that NI will follow their lead one day, but while they can milk us for the extra 50% I don't see a huge incentive for them to do so! Seems like a golden opportunity for the budding grey marketeers out there... All the best, Simon
OBD2 interface
Hi, Anyone know of any work done on developing a LabVIEW interface to talk to an OBD2-compliant engine management system? Simon Whitaker [EMAIL PROTECTED] Head of Software Development, Tiab Ltd tel: +44 (0)1295 714046 fax: +44 (0)1295 712334 web: http://www.tiab.co.uk/
[W] Getting IP address of a local network interface
Does anyone know of a way to get a list of the IP addresses associated with network interfaces on a Windows PC running LabVIEW? I could call IPCONFIG with a System Exec node and parse the output but that's a dirty hack, so I'd rather not. Simon Whitaker [EMAIL PROTECTED] Software developer, Tiab Ltd tel: +44 (0)1295 714046 fax: +44 (0)1295 712334 web: http://www.tiab.co.uk/
Running VIs on lesser version of LabVIEW
If I design a VI in LabVIEW 7.0 Full Edition, using features not available in the base edition (e.g. event handling), will the VI run on a PC that only has LabVIEW 7.0 Base Edition installed? Simon Whitaker [EMAIL PROTECTED] Software developer, Tiab Ltd tel: +44 (0)1295 714046 fax: +44 (0)1295 712334 web: http://www.tiab.co.uk/
Re: Label.
On Tue, 17 Feb 2004 22:03:49 -0300 Daniel Alejandro Moyano wrote: Hello! I need to apear label in a boolean control botton when it was selectioned. I use propertie node of control to do it. But when the label apear, position of control change. How can I do? I don't want the position control change. You could try using a caption instead of a label, leaving the caption visible at all times and toggling between an empty string and a non-empty string to effectively hide/show the caption. (You can't change label text at runtime, but you can change caption text.) Hope this helps, Simon Whitaker [EMAIL PROTECTED] Software developer, Tiab Ltd tel: +44 (0)1295 714046 fax: +44 (0)1295 712334 web: http://www.tiab.co.uk/
Re: Dual monitors for labview use
Hi Scott, Can anyone tell me what graphic cards work well with respect to using dual monitors and labview? How does the graphic card handle moving the display data from one monitor to another. I was considering the ATI Radeon 9800XT. Great for gaming as well. I remember someone talking about having the diagram window on one machine and the panel window on another. No more fussing around with the windows to do your work faster. We use dual monitors here, using a variety of different graphics cards. I have an nVidia GeForce FX5200 (great card, but take care if you buy one because they do single- and dual-monitor varieties), my boss has a Matrox card of some description, and one of our machines just uses two separate single-display cards. That machine runs XP, which has dual-monitor support built in, so you can use two separate single-display cards instead of a single dual-display card. In all cases, LabVIEW works just fine with them. The software we develop uses a subVI to retain the screen position of VIs and put them back in the same place next time they're launched (using the VI's Windows.Bounds property), and that has no problem coping with the dual display setup. As someone else has noted, XP and Windows 2000 treat dual monitors as one large desktop, so software doesn't need to be aware of which monitor it's running on, it just runs somewhere on that large desktop and neither knows nor cares whether that happens to be on monitor 1 or monitor 2. The only noticable difference between the various solutions we use is the facilities offered by the driver software that comes with the video card(s). My nVidia card comes with an app called nView that allows you to do all sorts of fancy things with your dual monitors, such as enabling window spanning across desktops, choosing which monitor specific apps open on, setting different wallpapers for each monitor and so on. The machine that uses two separate cards and relies on the dual monitor support built into XP lacks these advanced features, although it's still perfectly usable. If you have an XP machine with a spare PCI slot, a spare PCI graphics card and a spare monitor, try plugging the card into the PC and giving it a go - won't cost you anything, and you'll see it first-hand. Try before you buy! :-) One other off topic question. Have you guys/gals been buying and using LCD monitors? Anyone running them for a long time? I keep seeing used monitors show up on ebay that have a few/many lcds burnt out or broken in the display. How hard and expensive are they to repair if this is the case? I can solder as I'm a EE by nature. I've got an LCD monitor as my 2nd display - a fairly cheap 15 (1024x768) model that I have pivoted through 90 degrees (another feature supported by the nVidia software), making it great for working on documents. I've had it for about 4 months and haven't had any problems so far with dead pixels. We've got another LCD display that we've had for about a year, again no problems with dead pixels. Not sure how feasible it is to repair a dead pixel. Note that even new LCD monitors may ship with some dead pixels, and most manufacturers specify a tolerance level for dead pixels below which they won't replace a panel. All the best, Simon Whitaker [EMAIL PROTECTED] Software developer, Tiab Ltd tel: +44 (0)1295 714046 fax: +44 (0)1295 712334 web: http://www.tiab.co.uk/
Re: Array Wish list
Urs, you're dead right. I get the same results here (on Windows/LV7.0). My apologies to anyone I misled yesterday with my assertion that Transpose 2D is a memory hog. Clearly, it isn't. Jason, you're right too - of course it's possible to transpose an array without making a complete copy. I'll turn my brain to ON before cooking up these wild hypotheses in the future. I'm still interested to learn why the Transpose 2D Array wired to a FP indicator in my initial experiment (and Urs' first example below) consumes so much extra memory? Intuitively it would seem to require no more memory than the same VI without a transpose array function. All the best, Simon On Tue, 20 Jan 2004 22:45:04 +0100 Urs Lauterburg wrote: Dear wireworkers and data transposers, I made a short test on my LV7/MacOS-10.3.2 by creating a 1 million element DBL 2D-array of 1000x1000 size by creating random numbers in two nested For loops. Transposing the array before displaying the values in a plain regular 2D-array indicator adds 8MB and 1 block to the 16MB in 7 blocks of memory consumption. Execution time raises from 758ms to 972.7ms when doing the transpose function before displaying the values. However and this is the point, only a marginal overhead is present if no FP-display occurs, whereas the created 2D-Array is just disassembled by autoindexing in two nested For loops again. In this case the VI consumes 8MB of memory in 3 blocks in booth cases with the transpose function only adding a marginal overhead of 0.3kB. Execution time here raises from 672 to 686ms. So the test shows that it is fair to state that ''Transpose Array'' is an inplace function at least under MacOS-X. Don't let yourself fool by FP buffering which puts a much larger strain on LabVIEW's memory manager compared to plain BD-calculations. In fact due to the results, when FP-display takes place it easily consumes multiples of what the BD consumes. Are the results duplicatable on the politically correct platform too? Anyway happy wireworks as usual... Urs Urs Lauterburg Physics demonstrator LabVIEW wireworker University of Bern Switzerland The conclusion Well I was too lazy to do the test you performed, and I didn't find anything on NI's web site. But I'm nearly certain that the LV developers have said that transpose is an inplace function at several of the NIWeek session's I've attended. Maybe that's no longer true or maybe my memory has turned to mush (fairly probable given my advancing years). It's certainly possible to transpose an array while reusing the same buffer, you just have to make sure to move the elements in the right order, and you need a tiny scratch buffer. But I believe your test results. Maybe someone with inside knowledge will chime in here... Jason Dunham SF Industrial Software, Inc. -Original Message- From: Simon Whitaker [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2004 2:03 AM To: Info-LabVIEW List Subject: Re: Array Wish list On Mon, 19 Jan 2004 22:42:22 -0800 Jason Dunham wrote: As far as I've ever heard, the transpose arrays don't use any extra memory. The transpose function is done in place. I'm sure a few extra bytes are needed for temporary storage, but supposedly the same array buffer is reused. I would guess that the graph transpose option is also not a memory hog. Although a transposed array will consume the same amount of memory as the original array, the transpose function involves creating a new array, populating it using data from the original array, then deleting the original. This can have a significant effect on memory usage with a large array. LabVIEW stores multi-dimensional arrays as a list of data items plus 4 bytes per dimension to store the size of that dimension. You can therefore work out how much memory an array will use: size of array item in bytes x no. items + 4 x no. dimensions The no. dimensions element becomes insignificant for large arrays. So, an array of a million 16-bit integers will consume around an extra 2 million bytes (about 1.9MB) during transposition. You can confirm this by profiling some sample VIs, one with transposition and one without. I created two VIs: the first creates a 2D array containing 10,000,000 32-bit integers (10 x 1,000,000) and writes it to an indicator. The second is a copy of the first, with a transpose array node just before the indicator. The first VI consumes almost exactly 40,000K less than the second (84,000.94K vs 124,000.98K). According to the above formula the array will consume c. 10,000,000 x 4, = c. 39,000K. You may not need to worry about this memory hit if you're transposing small arrays, but if you're transposing arrays with many millions of elements your memory usage will increase significantly during transposition - especially if you're using a large data type like an extended precision float. All the best
Re: Memory-hogging charts
On Thu, 15 Jan 2004 10:44:35 GMT Simon Whitaker wrote: What on earth can be causing such a huge demand on system memory when these VIs are *loaded*?? I can email a sample VI to anyone who's interested - the file's only 15KB large, but you'll need plenty of RAM to load it into LabVIEW! I suspect a chart history buffer size of 1,000,000 might have had something to do with it! Eek! Problem solved! Simon Whitaker [EMAIL PROTECTED] Software developer, Tiab Ltd tel: +44 (0)1295 714046 fax: +44 (0)1295 712334 web: http://www.tiab.co.uk/
Memory-hogging charts
We have a VI which, when loaded (not run), causes LabVIEW's memory consumption to leap from 22MB to 114MB. I've managed to narrow the cause of this this gluttonous behaviour down to two waveform chart indicators on the front panel. There appears to be nothing special about these charts, but when I delete them from the FP, LabVIEW's memory usage drops right back down to near 22MB. If I copy one of these charts to an otherwise completely blank VI, that VI demands an extra 46MB of memory. What on earth can be causing such a huge demand on system memory when these VIs are *loaded*?? I can email a sample VI to anyone who's interested - the file's only 15KB large, but you'll need plenty of RAM to load it into LabVIEW! All the best, Simon Whitaker [EMAIL PROTECTED] Software developer, Tiab Ltd tel: +44 (0)1295 714046 fax: +44 (0)1295 712334 web: http://www.tiab.co.uk/
Re: bad news?
On Tue, 13 Jan 2004 10:50:04 -0600 Scott Serlin wrote: Looks like Microsoft is trying to get into NI's space here. SoftWire is a graphical programming extension for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Not sure that conclusion holds. Softwire isn't a core part of VS.NET, and the technology doesn't appear to be owned in any way by MS. Anyone can make an extension for VS.NET, it doesn't necessarily follow that they're in Uncle Bill's pocket. All the best, Simon Whitaker [EMAIL PROTECTED] Software developer, Tiab Ltd tel: +44 (0)1295 714046 fax: +44 (0)1295 712334 web: http://www.tiab.co.uk/
Re: LabVIEW Wishlist - Last Used Functions and Controls
On Tue, 13 Jan 2004 18:44:37 +0100 rolf.ostvik wrote: Just curious, what is wrong with: Right click and nail the function palette Open it for the functions you want Right click and nail another function palette Open it for the functions you want Right click and nail yeat another function palette Open it for the functions you want Except for: - It is not dynamic (but it is customizable) - It takes some place on the screen I have two monitors hooked up to my PC, and I highly recommend it. When I'm running LabVIEW I have block diagrams/front panels on my main monitor, and a plethora of palettes, (context) help etc on the second monitor. If you run Windows XP, dual-monitor support is built into the OS. This means that you don't need a dedicated dual-monitor video card - two separate video cards will do, so you can add a cheap video card and a cheap monitor to your existing system and you're off. If you've got a spare monitor to hand then you're about $20 away from LabVIEW nirvana. :-) If you're buying a 2nd video card bear in mind that you almost certainly won't have more than one AGP slot, so the 2nd video card will probably have to be a PCI one. All the best, Simon Whitaker [EMAIL PROTECTED] Software developer, Tiab Ltd tel: +44 (0)1295 714046 fax: +44 (0)1295 712334 web: http://www.tiab.co.uk/
