ALARM Meeting Recaps

[Dave_Thomson]

Last night ALARM had a special session, thanks to a trip up from Austin by Tony Vento (NI Applications Engineering) and Christian Loew (NI Systems Engineering).  Over 30 people attended, with more on teleconference.  Tony and Christian presented an overview of the current status and future plans for the Shared Variables.  They addressed the list of issues posted on the ALARM website, and solicited additional feedback on Shared Variables from ALARM members.  Thanks to NI for bringing these LabVIEW experts out to Colorado - and for the pizza and drinks!

Tony and Christian will be posting an updated version of the Shared Variables issues document on our site.  Once it is posted, feel free to add to it.  This is a great opportunity to get your feedback and ideas into NI's inner workings.

DaveT

[LaurelA]

TDMS was the topic for the December 10, 2009 ALARM meeting. Steve Solja presented a technique to use tree structured .ini files to configure the attributes for TDMS data. He promises to post the software for us all to look at! Buddy Haun gave an in-depth review of writing data to TDMS files, with an overview of some of the properties that could be bundled with the data (such as calibration information and scaling information). He discussed the differences between TDMS and TDM (which uses separate XML files for the properties). Reading the files with Matlab, C Octive (a GNU free product) and Excel led to lively discussion. As did the new NI Data Finder (the seems at times to be a memory hog). After the meeting Matt Richardson found that Igor can also import TDM files. Thanks to the presenters - and to NI for the pizza and drinks! Check back for the next meeting content, we have several ideas in the works!

LaurelA

[Dave_Thomson]

   We had a great turn-out at the May 20th meeting last night - over 2 dozen people showed up.  Steve Solga showed off some great techniques for using VI's in subpanels and other user interface techniques.  I showed some benchmarks on how to transfer large amounts of data between two loops.  And Buddy gave a presentation on LVOOP.  Thanks to everyone for the presentations and discussions, and to NI for the pizza!

DaveT

[Dave_Thomson]

   More than 30 people attended the Sept 16th meeting of ALARM.  Thanks to Bill V.A. for his tips on image stamping and handling custom error codes.  Will Denman gave a recap from NIWeek, including an overview of some of the great new features in LabVIEW 2010.  And thanks to Bill Brown for his presentation on Notifiers, including some subtleties with advanced functions and some gotcha's about using Notifiers.

   Please post ideas for future presentations, or better yet volunteer to make a presentation.  Looking forward to seeing everybody in December.

DaveT

[Dave_Thomson]

Despite a last minute change of venu, we had over two dozen people show up for the Dec 9, 2010 ALARM meeting.  Thanks to Craig Eidson for showing us the basics of using XML in LabVIEW and providing some guidelines on when to use it as well as the pros and cons.  Steve Solga and Dave Thomson then presented on Circular Buffers.  After Dave showed an example of a typical functional global Circular Buffer, Steve presented a novel idea for using lossy queues as Circular Buffers, and then did some benchmarking to compare the two techniques.

Hope to see you at the next meeting on Feb 17, 2010 at the School of Mines.  Please let us know if you have a presentation you would like to give or ideas for topics you are interested in.

DaveT

[Dave_Thomson]

   We had almost two dozen people show up at the last ALARM meeting.  Thanks to Matt Richardson, Bill Brown, and Bill Van Arsdale for presenting.  Matt followed up last time's discussion of circular buffers with a demonstration of an XControl in which he embedded a circular buffer in a graph.  Bill Brown described his Dynamite application in which he integrated Python scripts into a large (>21k nodes) test platform.  Bill Van Arsdale showed several useful LabVIEW tips, including a system call for how long the computer has been idle, an improvement to the file dialog for using extension filters, and a surprising performance test on two ways to execute a cubic spline.

   The schedule for future ALARM meetings is changing.  Watch for posting of upcoming meetings.

DaveT

[Dave_Thomson]

ALARM held its May meeting last night at CU.  The turnout was a bit smaller than usual, but the presentations were great.  Laurel Watts gave a comparison of TCP-IP with a custom wrapper to Network Streams.  Joe Zoller gave a presentation on debugging techniques in LabVIEW, followed by some more unusual debugging techniques he has dug up, including LabVIEW back-doors and Windows debugging tools external to LabVIEW.  Thanks to Laurel and Joe, and to NI for the pizza!

We're now on our bi-monthly schedule, so stay tuned for our next meeting on July 21st at CSM!

DaveT

[Dave_Thomson]

The meeting last night was well attended, with over 20 members showing up.  Ron Harmon gave a recap on some of the new features in LabVIEW 2011, and Buddy Haun presented Tips and Tricks for using SVN with LabVIEW.  Thanks to both for their presentations.

DaveT

[LesHammer]

Recap:  November 17, 2011 ALARM Meeting at Colorado School of Mines.

The Next meeting is scheduled for the 3^rd Thursday in January at CU, but Nancy has requested choosing a different night of the month because she has a conflict with another meeting that also meets on the 3^rd Thursday every month. 

•   Perhaps a separate discussion thread should be started for this. 

William Brown – Accessing VI’s in an executable

          Some people use static references

            Google “LabVIEW wwwbrown executable” for William’s solution

            Code finds trunk for the directory

            Files must all be on one drive

Steve Solga –   User Events in LabVIEW RT

Bill VanArsdale

• cubic smoothing

          Smooth data without taking away the peaks

            LV has a routine to do this, but this one can handle larger sizes

• Applications from the system tray

• User Messages

Temporary Floating Windows

Don’t stop the program the way dialog boxes would

Can be set to fade away or log to file

[Eric_Cunningham]

Bill,

On a related note, you mentioned you may put an Insteon demo together for voice recognition (back in 2009).  Do you have any LV drivers for Insteon?  I'm interested in doing some fun home automation and am looking for ways to interface between LV and the hardware.

Eric