topic Re: Re : Re: Re : Chilly Charly's Emoticons in BreakPoint

Starware - A new concept ?

chilly_charly — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 14:02:03 GMT

Most of us have developped vi's that could be shared with the community. It is always possible to submit our work as example code to the developper_zone. However, I believe that the BreakPoint could also be a nice place to discuss and share these programs, may be before effectively posting them to the NI example database, just to make sure that this is worthwhile, after bug correction and GUI improvement...

Of course, the posted vis should be a little bit more elaborated than the poor (;)) examples we are used to propose as answers to the forum. No constraint. Just the feeling that the best has been done to make things attractive.

The Starware basic idea is simple : Download the vi, try it, and if you like it, reward the author with 5 stars (other ratings are strictly forbidden !). If you think

Where is the difference with the usual practice of the LV forum ? Well, usually people are searching for a solution for an immediate problem. And they get answers developped as rapidly as possible, because we usually have not a lot of time (often because we are racing with others, shhhh :)). Here the situation will be different : we'll not give actual solutions, we'll be proposing tools as potential solutions to questions that either were asked in the past, and not completly answered or were not asked yet !.. And there will be no time constraint for that !..

That could be also a good place for JPD to re-win his lost stars...

A single rule : don't forget to change the "Message Subject" to some meaningfull title !

Convert diagram to image file - Diagram to png.vi

chilly_charly — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 14:33:54 GMT

Solutions to this problem have already been proposed. For instance by Altenbach, here. That's something I discovered a bit late. A chance, because I developed a slightly different version, which works also on unsaved vis and on vis belonging to llbs.

Just drag the vi icon to the diagram of the Diagram to png.vi, then run.

The image path name is displayed and saved to the clipboard, ready to be pasted in the NI forum reply window.

Hope that this will help to increase your productivity 😉

Re: Convert diagram to image file - Diagram to png.vi

altenbach — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 15:42:52 GMT

Het, that's pretty cool! 😄 (I assume it's windows only ;))

Wouldn't it be nice if it worked with broken VIs.... 😮

Re: Convert diagram to image file - Diagram to png.vi

chilly_charly — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 16:24:56 GMT

Of course it's Windows only. I never found an utility to copy to a Mac clipboard 😞

Since there is no way to run a vi containing a broken vi, I suppose that your solution is the only one possible. May be we could combine both in a single vi ?

Other possible improvement : combine the FP and BD pictures in a single image (upon request).

Re: Convert diagram to image file - Diagram to png.vi

altenbach — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 18:31:20 GMT

OK, I modified it to also work with broken VIs and unsaved broken VIs 🙂

Instead of having to place the VI on the BD, it simply creates a listbox of all VIs in memory (by default, system VIs are not shown). Just double-click the desired file and it will save the diagram image and optionally the FP image, even on broken VIs!

I also added a few options, e.g. "preview only" (don't save any VIs), show/hide system VIs, Sort by name, save also FP (Yes, I hate dialog popups!), FP visible area only?

For my sanity and to reduce disk clutter, all images are saved in the temporary directory of the system.

(The VI could easily be modified to populate the list with VIs located in a certain folder or .llb.)

Of course there could be bugs. Any feedback welcome! ;).

Yes, it could be modified so this program itself does not show in the list, but then we would not have anything to play if nothing else is loaded. 😉

Message Edited by altenbach on 08-20-2005 11:40 AM

Re: Convert diagram to image file - Diagram to png.vi

JeanPierre — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 23:04:42 GMT

I have stripped down altenbach's version and modified it so it can now be invoked from the Tools menu. Put the VI in LabVIEW\Project directory and restart LabVIEW to refresh the Tools menu.

Re: Convert diagram to image file - Diagram to png.vi

chilly_charly — Sun, 21 Aug 2005 06:09:36 GMT

Last min problem with attachments, see the next message... 😠

Message Edité par chilly charly le 08-21-2005 08:14 AM

Re: Convert diagram to image file - Diagram to png.vi

chilly_charly — Sun, 21 Aug 2005 06:39:56 GMT

iNCLUDING

Re: Convert diagram to image file - Diagram to png.vi

chilly_charly — Sun, 21 Aug 2005 06:43:04 GMT

Adding a command to the Tool menu was a great idea ! Where did you find the property node JPD ?

Added the possibility to save both the diagram and the FP in a single png.

Press <shift> to have both images in a single pict

Press <f> to get only the FP image

Message Edité par chilly charly le 08-21-2005 08:45 AM

Re: Convert diagram to image file - Diagram to png.vi

chilly_charly — Sun, 21 Aug 2005 07:03:21 GMT

And to avoid tst complains (because that would not be a smart way for him to reach the 3 golden bars level ;)), here is a 7.0 version. I guess some other will also behappy with that...

Re: Convert diagram to image file - Diagram to png.vi

JeanPierre — Sun, 21 Aug 2005 13:59:59 GMT

chilly charly a écrit:

Adding a command to the Tool menu was a great idea ! Where did you find the property node JPD ?

It is a private property that I originally found exposed in the Web Publishing Tool (or what it was called in 5.1...). I still wonder why such an innocuous and useful property is kept private...

Re: Convert diagram to image file - Diagram to png.vi

jr_2005 — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 09:02:01 GMT

@chilly charly wrote:

And to avoid tst complains (because that would not be a smart way for him to reach the 3 golden bars level ;)), here is a 7.0 version. I guess some other will also behappy with that...

'Him' ? I thought the consensus was that tst was female?? Sitting on a total of 1999 posts and no doubt just itching to send in another one.

Starware - VI version

chilly_charly — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 16:09:32 GMT

The attached starware finds the version of a freshly opened vi. May be that will decrease the number of not-the-right-version posts.

Drop Get VI version into the Project folder (inside the LabVIEW application folder) and restart LabVIEW. A new sub-menu (VI version...) will appear in the Tool menu. Call this menu after opening an unknown vi.

Now, if somebody knows how to create short-cup menus for the Tool menu items...

Re: Starware - VI version

JeanPierre — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 17:39:57 GMT

Charly, can you check the html code in your sig? it seems to mess the board layout in Firefox. Thanks

Re: Starware - VI version

tst — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 17:47:33 GMT

I'm not sure it's the sig, because it doesn't do this in other threads (although it has stopped moving).

Correction - it seems to be a problem whenever he posts an attachment.

I say, let it be...
At most, we can't give Charly any stars.

Message Edited by tst on 08-24-2005 08:49 PM

Re: Starware - VI version

JeanPierre — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 18:33:58 GMT

It seems to mess only threads with attachments...
Sorry for the 4*s, my mistake

Re: Starware - VI version

Joe_H — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 15:23:15 GMT

Here is an application that I came up with that allows to edit the graph properties of any vi. Still hacking it together, any and all feedback is gratefull. Tell me what I can do better or what I should not do at all. I do not want to fall into bad habbits as that will be easy for me to do. I did not use subvis because I wanted it to where anyone can put it in there tools menu I got most of the ideas from openG and I give them the credit they deserve. I created this tool because I work with graphs alot and some of the times I'M out in the sun with a laptop collecting data and sometimes the graphs are hard to see.

Save your back and your eyes (and your stomach)!

tst — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 16:38:03 GMT

OK, here's a slightly different application which is not strictly LV related. We constantly hear that sitting in front of the computer all the time is not good for you and that we should get up every once in a while. I also keep forgetting to go to lunch. I also had downloaded quite some time ago the ActiveX tray icon object from this site and wanted to do something with it.

So, I wrote a small application which combines all three - it sits in the windows tray, provides a popup at set intervals to remind me to get up and provides a popup to remind me to go eat lunch. It can also be disabled so that you don't start getting popups in the middle of important meetings.

Now, I realize that at least some of this functionality can be achieved through programs such as Outlook, but I don't have anything like that running and I find this to be light on its feet (except for the LV RTE overhead).

More details:

Most importantly, this will only work in windows, because the core of the application is minimizing it to the system tray. This can obviously be worked around by creating a completely invisible or floating application, but I don't want to.
This needs the ActiveX object which can be found here. You have to install it. I tried once to handle tray icons through DLL calls, but the structures are rather complex and I didn't have time to go over it properly. I don't know how many versions of windows this will work on. I tried it on XP and it works fine. I deleted those VIs from the LLB, so when you open it, it might need to search for them.
It includes some VIs from winutil32. As far as I could see, they all use functions from user32.dll, so I don't think anyone should have a problem.
The path to the icon is in the INI file and is absolute. You need to modify it depending on where you place the program or you will have a blank space in the tray instead of an icon.
My suggestion (and what I did) is to build this into an EXE and place it in the startup folder. That way it runs every time I start the computer.
The ActiveX object randomly returns errors (even "critical" errors). So far, they didn't seem to affect the continued operation of the object, so you might choose to disable the error popup.
This is not exactly the version I'm using. My version has several proprietary VIs which I had to replace. I quickly tested this version and it seemed to work fine.

There are probably some other things which I can't remember at the moment. I'd be happy to hear if anyone had ideas for improving this, although I don't think I will personally add any improvements to it, as it does what I want. One thing I thought about is displaying a random line of text, taken from the INI file, instead of the usual line, but I'm not bored enough to implement that.

Disclaimer - if your computer explodes because of this, it's not my fault! Blame it on the Boogie!

Re: Save your back and your eyes (and your stomach)!

tbob — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 19:27:59 GMT

I have a request concerning the CreateDiagramPicture vi for anyone who has time to fool with it. I wish I had the time. Presently this vi creates a png file of the complete block diagram and/or front panel (correct me if I'm wrong), and it works great. CC, JPD, and Altenbach did a great job.

Sometimes I want to create a picture of just part of the diagram. It would be nice if the vi could be modified to create a picture of only the selected part of a block diagram. Is this too much to ask? If it is, I can always edit the picture as it is now.

Message Edited by tbob on 02-16-2006 12:29 PM

Re: Save your back and your eyes (and your stomach)!

tst — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 19:34:27 GMT

If I remember correctly, I looked at the available scripting methods at the time and did not find a native method for getting just part of the diagram. I think the only one available was the one that was used.