Ludwik Kordas presented the concept of a Circular Buffer (CB) and various ways to implement it in LabVIEW. His presentation and example VI’s are included in this post.

A VIG or “functional global” is a LabVIEW VI that provides the features of a global variable while overcoming some of the down sides of an actual global variable. A function global uses uninitialized shift registers to maintain state information and a typedef function to select the mode of operation. This example implements a stopwatch [...]

There was a lot of interest at our last group meeting about NI certification tests. The Certified LabVIEW Associate Developer (CLAD) is the first step in getting certified. The test shows knowledge of LabVIEW basics. If you have had the LabVIEW Basics class (now called Core 1) or if you have some real-life experience with [...]

Good vision systems are difficult to engineer. Our brain, as far as computations are concerned, is a very parallel system. It can account for contrast and brightness, recognize and categorize a seemingly endless number of shapes, and set our eyes to focus faster than any commercial camera, all simultaneously. It can also, through the depth [...]

Multithread programming in traditional languages can be a challenge. The programmer is responsible for managing many things, such as: Separating logical tasks Avoiding race conditions Avoiding thread starvation conditions Managing communication between the threads LabVIEW, on the other hand, lends itself easily to multithreaded programming. In fact, if you follow the dataflow rules, multithreading will [...]

You can make pop-up windows quickly and easily by using tab controls. By using tab controls, you can create the same visual effect and the same functionality as a pop-up window, but you don’t need to create a sub-VI. Since you never leave the VI, you don’t need to worry about passing information into and [...]

One rule to remember when designing a user interface is to do things in standard ways. For example, if you want to close a program in Windows, you click the red X button in the upper right-hand corner of the window. Most LabVIEW™ have a tell-tale “Stop” or “Done” button. That always bugs me. Why [...]

Error handling. You know you have to do…well, you should do it…well, maybe you will get the code working and then come back later and add proper error handling. Let’s be honest, you will never go back and do it. If you can’t take time to do it right the first time, how do you [...]