Showing Actor Front Panel on cRIO

[KALee]

I appreciate the way in which AF forces me to structure my thinking about messaging in my applications.  I lurked long enough to have read the vast discussions about whether or not AF is the right tool for a given programmer and application.  All I know right now is that it has been the right tool for this programmer.  The structure AF requires has shown me that I had a lot to learn about structuring my code. No more cheating or sloppiness.

[MattP]

Just to close the loop on this, I recommend going that kind of route if you're developing for a headless embedded platform - UI-level debugging often just isn't an option in those type of systems. 

For desktop applications, I can't recommend Desktop Execution Trace Toolkit highly enough as a debugging tool for actors.  Alas, this is not supported on RT platforms.

Wrapping some functionality into a non-reentrant subVI for debugging purposes is a very good method if you have IDE available for debugging.  In my own development, I've found that in deployed scenarios my customers will very rarely have a copy of LabVIEW available, and as such I either need to have IDE-independent methods of getting debugging traces or I'm going to be spending a lot of time walking someone through what they need to do (or I'm getting on a plane). 

Thus, for embedded applications, I like taking the debug information I could expose via a non-reentrant subVI and instead expose it via other means.  Lately I've been using web services heavily for this sort of work, since all the customer needs is a web browser. 

[AristosQueue (NI)]

The next version of the AF for LV 2015 should -- fingers crossed because it is never too late for features to get pulled back -- include nodes for updating the Desktop Execution Trace Toolkit for each message fire and receipt. These have already been added to the github image for those of you with access to it. At some point one of us will get enough spare bandwidth to create a new VIPackage for that mod to the AF for those of you who aren't waiting for LV 2015. It won't happen in November if it is on my shoulders, but soon, I hope.

[jordankuehnsef]

I hate to dig up an old post, but this seems to have settled on a note that I wish were a little different and I hope that it is not still the case (I have logging and debugging sorted out to my satisfaction, good notes). I have an AF cRIO project where I'm looking to add a FP to the Embedded UI. It seems like that only FP I can get to show is the main launcher VI that spins up the root Actor. I can put a helper loop in there and transfer some data back out to it, but I would really prefer to be able to display an actor core UI. This is not for debugging, but more for a local HMI to the system. Has anything changed or is it as I understand it that the top level vi is the only FP I can display?

[wrkcrw00]

I've launched many actor vi's on a cRIO using the embedded UI. This was with both the 903x and 904x series. I was only doing it for debugging, but it worked fine. It's been awhile so I don't recall what if any issues I ran into. Drop a front panel invoke node of the BD of Actor Core.vi and it should work. I have launched many Actor Core.vi's at the same time, even dynamically launching a few too many :-).

[jordankuehnsef]

Perfect! I don't know why I let myself get stuck with the boolean input on the launch actor VI or the execution show front panel settings. Thank you.

[saryanpanah1]

Hi 

I am trying to open an actor core front panel in my AF code on a RT target using front panel invoke node as you suggested. However, it does not work and does not open the front panel. Did I miss anything here?