LabVIEW Idea Exchange

In my project, I wanted to set the cell color in excel as red during a failure condition. But to my surprise I found that the color was set to blue and NOT red.It took me a long time to understand that the hexadecimal values for the color constants are different in Labview and MS Excel.

I wonder why the color constants are not standardised, when Labview supports features like ActiveX controls. 

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

As part of the base package in the LabVIEW Developer Suite, include an integrated SCC in the IDE. We are using a third party SCC program right now, and it has it's quirks when integrating with LabVIEW. Our group is comfortable with the quirks now, but for a new group starting a new project, the hurdles might be big enough to nix SCC. If a LabVIEW-specific package was maintained with the IDE, those quirks could be reconciled for the LabVIEW-specific style (i.e., a file is "modified" when compiled, diffing two VI's, ...)

 

NI has been really promoting SCC recently, and I think they should officially develop (or adopt) an integrated package with the LabVIEW IDE.

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.

Like it or loathe it, Microsoft Excel is heavily used for storing, recording and analysing lots of data and many LabVIEW programmers must find they need to get data into or out of Excel. However LabVIEW lacks the ability to read and write Excel files directly. It is possible to exchange data with Excel via ActiveX automation, but this:

 

• requires Excel to be installed on the same computer as the LabVIEW application
• is not cross platform
• is complicated to do
• does not appear to work reliably across different versions of Excel

 

The Report Generation Toolkit allows creation of Excel files but this costs extra and is not cross platform. 

 

Many software packages can read data directly from Excel .xls files (e.g. Umetrics SIMCA-P) and presumably it is therefore also straightforward to write data out in Excel .xls format. Native LabVIEW functions for reading and writing .xls files - for example, into string arrays - would be very useful. It would not be necessary to support formatting, charts etc - although some kind of basic formatting support might be useful.

 

Of course it is possible to exchange data with Excel via delimited files (comma- or tab-separated values) but the .csv format requires characters such as quote marks, commas and carriage returns in a string to be escaped so that they are not incorrectly interpreted as part of the file structure. Tab-separated files suffer less from this problem but on Windows at least, files with a .tsv extension are not automatically associated with Excel whereas .csv files are. It would be helpful if LabVIEW also had native functions for reading and writing .csv files with correct escaping for Excel.