FRONT PANEL ANIMATION

[fairhairedwineboy]

Many customers in today's world expect animated HMIs.  I have worked with many industrial touch panel HMIs.  LabVIEW is a tremendously powerful tool, however complex front panel animations are painfully program intensive to create.  The best HMI for animation that I have ever used gives you the ability to create objects with basic drawing tools that can then be grouped and assigned animation properties for the group such as translation, rotation, color etc.  that are configured in the properties of the group.  Variables and expressions can be used for the various animation parameters.  It goes even further by allowing you to have nested animation groups. This allows for some cool animation that is not that difficult to create.  Unfortunately this HMI is not very good at a lot of other stuff.

For now, the simple ability to have a property node for rotation would be great.  I would like to be able to associate property nodes with graphic items such as lines, rectangles, bitmaps, etc. without having to create custom controls.

[X.]

Put a Picture in the background of your panel and draw whatever you want there.

Examples with "Picture" in them will give you a sense of how easy that is.

[fairhairedwineboy]

I am aware of using pictures, however this does not give the kind of control that I desire or have had with other applications.  Hard for me to understand why LabVIEW has not added a simple rotation property by now.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

> Hard for me to understand why LabVIEW has not added a simple rotation property by now.

The explanation is straightforward: Nearly zero requests for rotation; low priority even if it were requested; many more high priority tasks to consume development team.

This is the sort of request that can bounce around for years until someone gets enough spare time and a specific impetus to implement. There really isn't a driving business case. LV does need a general refresh of its graphics layer, which is being worked on [see the platform preview, announced as "in development" at NIWeek last year], and rotation is one of those things that will be possible with the new system, although -- I just checked -- rotation has specifically been knocked off the list of priority support because it takes more work to support in the editor and we found nearly zero user interfaces using arbitrary rotation when we looked at various applications (not just LV apps but all apps).

It's a nice to have. I hope it shows up someday. It won't be soon.

[X.]

BTW, you posted this idea after commenting on an idea which was itself a duplicate of it... or maybe you found it after you posted yours?

In any case, it is a duplicate.

Note: funny to read AQ's comment at the time...

[Darren]

Any idea that has received less than 2 kudos within 2 years after posting will be automatically declined.