LabVIEW Idea Exchange

Hello,

 

I work as a LabVIEW integrator and for one of my customer I develop application, with maintenance goal for their installation all over the world with RS232 or Bluetooth communication for example, deployed on targets as PDA (PocketPC 2003 & Windows Mobile 6) or Touch Panel (Windows CE 4.2 to 5.0) using LabVIEW 8.6 Mobile Module.

This LabVIEW additonal module works quite well to deploy the same application in this differant targets, but I encountered some problems and I have some suggestions for Mobile Module :

 

1/ MMI (Man Machine Interface)

      -  for graphics indicators (as Gauge or Slide) graphical object ramp or multi Slider is deleted by LabVIEW when you build an EXE => I think that a graphical objets with all its graphical property could be added in Mobile Module (and works on these all targets). See examples in GraphicalObjects.PNG

      - as I say in my introduction my application is deployed all over the world and usually I used "Caption" dynamic modification for multilingual management for all my controls & indicators. But in mobile module we can't do this (but we can modify dynamically boolean text), so I think that it could be possible.

 

2/ VISA (& Bluetooth) Management

      -  I think there is a bug with VISA installation. Indeed with the installer you can choose the installation directory (default directory or specific directory : in non volatil memory) but if you don't install VISA support in default directory it doesn't work (with PocketPC 2003 for example) I think that could be resolved

-  As I said in introduction my application could communicate throught different protocols (RS232, Bluetooth) and with LV 8.6 Mobile Module we can now use VISA : great !!!. But in Windows Mobile 6, VISA does not support bluetooth (it seems to have an incompatibility with virtual aliases in the registry) ; and in PocketPC2003 it works very well. I think that could be resolved

The default LabVIEW environment option should not show terminals as an icon. 

 

I like using Linux whenever I can, particularly when running large software like LabVIEW, since it tends to crawl on my XP systems. I was happy to realize that LabVIEW works on Linux, but soon after I was disappointed by the lack of usefulness of it when interfacing with hardware. I need to use the RealTime module to interface with my RealTime Compact-RIO. I also need Linux support for the FPGA module, as I need to program the FPGA attached to my cRIO. I'm sure I am not the only person who would like the ability to do this.

 

Without support for any of the hardware or LabVIEW modules I need, the Linux version of LabVIEW is entirely useless to me, and XP as an OS simply cannot perform up to par for me.

For distribution, only package necessary libraries in installer packages built with the project. A lightweight UI, server, or client does not need a full 70MB+ installer that bloats out to a few hundred MB's once installed! A colleague has remarked that the total size of our LabVIEW application+RTE EXCEEDS the entire size of the XPe image running on the embedded computer! This becomes an issue when distributing software upgrades to places in the world without high-speed internet connectivity.

Using Google Apps and similar products I've come to really love the access I get to all that functionality regardsless of which computer I'm on.  Imagine how great it would be if you could have LabVIEW available in the same way!

 

All the work, your VI libs, the compilation etc. would be on the hosting server (sharing VI libs, source code control and collaboration in general could be made very flexible indeed). There would be a few challenges to overcome, e.g. when you are writing code for different targets, but nothing unsolvable I think...(if there are any show stoppers we could have both...a web based editor as well as the traditional solution).

 

And the host could offer you to work in previous versions of LabVIEW...and new versions would be available as soon as they are launched, and you could build apps for different operative systems in one go.... no volume license manager headaches...the list of possibilities and improvements is endless