LabVIEW Idea Exchange

In the "R" language, Hadley Wickham is a superstar.  (personal, git)

One of his packages is "lubridate".  It has a stack of very useful time/date handling utilities.  They are most useful for "speaking human" or in average-person-facing user interfaces.

You should look at the utility here.  Things like elapsed time in days, or holiday handling built-in.  That might be useful to have in a clean and native package.

LabVIEW currently has functions Format Date/Time String and Scan Value to convert between time stamps and strings.  Unfortunately, these functions do not handle arrays of time stamps and strings.  While this conversion can be handled using a For Loop, a specific function would be cleaner and probably faster.  This functionality is currently available for other numerics and should be extended to time stamps.

I suggest modifying the Format Date/Time String function to handle arrays of time stamps, integers and floating point numbers as well as single values.  An additional function Date/Time Sring to Time Stamp should be created to convert strings and array of strings to time stamps.

I am submitting this request based on a recent suggestion from a customer.

After doing a peak detect, the customer wants to find full width at half maximum(FWHM) of those peaks. 

However, in order to calculate FWHM, information of quadratic fit used to find the peaks is needed. However, we cannot get the equation from Peak Detector.vi. This means, the user needs to do an additional quadratic fit, and then calcualte FWHM after that.

It would be very nice if we can get FWHM from the Peak Detector.vi.

A few special functions are incorrectly named in the LabVIEW documentation.

- the incomplete gamma function VI returns the regularized lower incomplete gamma function (as is the case in LabWindows/CVI).

- the incomplete beta function VI returns the regularized incomplete beta function.

Suggestion: change the description (and name) of these VIs to reflect their common mathematical definition.

Valid at least until LabVIEW 2013 SP1.

It is always great practice to make your code as readable and scalable as possible, along with good documentation.  One of the things that get overlooked the most, without even realizing, is having coerced inputs to your functions or VI's.  When you have finished developing a program, it goes through a great deal of review to validate all its functionalities.  Coerced inputs can be one of those issues that can come back to haunt you down the road.  I think having an icon on the toolbar and/or a shortcut keystroke to populate a list of all VI's containing coerced inputs would be a great help with identifying all the necessary functions that need to be examined.