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 [...]

Mark your calendar. First day back from Memorial Day vacation is the next user group meeting. Topic: LabVIEW Design Patterns – VIG Timer, Producer/Consumer, and more This meeting will be at Seneca5, Tuesday June 1st at 6:30. We serve pizza, so you can come straight from work. Check out the LabVIEW Advanced User Group page for [...]

It’s time again for our monthly LabVIEW user group meeting. The topic this time is Motor Control with LabVIEW. This meeting will be at Seneca5, Tuesday April 6th at 6:30. We serve pizza, so you can come straight from work. Check out the LabVIEW Advanced User Group page for more details.

Previously, I posted a listbox control with improved icons. Some have asked if it can be used for multicolumn listboxes, too. Well, yet it can. And here it is. (Actually, you can just use the listbox control. Right click and select Replace. Replace it with a multicolumn listbox. The new multicolumn box will maintain the [...]

When I head out to my work shed to build something with my tools, the tools I use are picked by one and only one person…me! That’s the way LabVIEW used to be, too, back in the good old days. Now it’s all about the young kids and their automatic tool selection. La-ti-da! Manual tool [...]

In my day, we knew that LabVIEW was an acronym, so we spelled it with capital VIEW as God intended! We knew it because we were there when it was being made. Sure, the first versions of LabVIEW were icons chiseled on stone tablets, but we liked it that way! And there is one thing [...]

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 [...]