Some questions/comments on AF Hands-On Exercise (Version 2, 21 Aug 2012)

[justACS]

CTRL + SHIFT + RUN just forces a recompile.  It isn't secret, but I've only heard about it through word-of-mouth, myself.  You haven't heard about it until now because we don't need to do it very often.

The crash dialog you are seeing is just part of LabVIEW's response to crashes of all kinds, so there is no general answer regarding cause.  I don't want to speculate on the cause of this particular crash, but I did file a CAR, and that should get us somewhere.

The problem of failing to restart a fan after both fans fault is a known issue with the example.  I go back and forth on whether I should fix it.  It isn't pertinent to the lesson itself, but it does seem to be a distraction.

The water valve is a piece of hardware controlled by a digital output (so, open or closed).  The valve is controlled to maintain water level, which drops over time as water is lost to evaporation.  The water pump is completely unrelated to water level.  It is just something that gets turned on when the cooler needs to turn on.  In an actual cooler, the pump sprays water over a set of wood wool pads, but the water then returns to the water reservoir.

[JGruenberg]

Is there any update on this?  One of my own AF applications has been crashing, and I wonder if the issue is related.

[Bob_Schor]

I've just finished working through the posted Example, making notes of some inconsistencies, finding a few logic errors, and trying to document everything as I go.  I'll try to connect with Allen or Stephen at NI Week and see if I can get this "improved" version, with updated instructions (which I'd volunteer to write, particularly if I have access to the existing text so I don't have to retype everything) available to the Community.

Incidently, while doing this, I had several "We apologize for the Inconvenience" crashes of LabVIEW.  I generally was able to Restart/Recover, with few ill effects.  I should note that I'm running LabVIEW 2012 (as installed from the Fall Distribution DVDs), with additional updates from both the Spring (2012 SP1) Distribution and any updates suggested by NI Updates.  In particular, I have not downloaded the latest AF distribution.

I'm looking forward to installing LabVIEW 2013 (which I'll do as soon as the disks arrive).  What version of AF is on the 2013 Distribution?

BS

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Bob_Schor wrote:

I'm looking forward to installing LabVIEW 2013 (which I'll do as soon as the disks arrive).  What version of AF is on the 2013 Distribution?

Unless I have screwed up pushing a change to both the website and to 2013*, LV 2013 should be using the experimental 4.3 fork which got signoff from enough people for me to commit to the 2013 branch.

Regardless, I have verified to the best of my ability that the 2013 release is fully backward compatible with LV 2012. The 2013 adds some capacities but does not, so far as I know, change any connector panes or break any functionality of the 2012 release.

Maintaining both the website and the official submissions to LV is harder work than I expected. It's so easy to push one and forget about the other. Some sort of more public source code control system is clearly called for if I'm going to push new versions after the 2013 release. I've been using git lately for another project. I hate it, but I haven't seen anything else that I can use as a public, branchable, trackable SCC system, though I'm told there may be something in Google Docs cloud... I haven't checked that rumor out yet.