Blinking indicator different when compiled vs. development environment

[gmand]

Hello all,

I have a blinking Boolean indicator. In Options -> Environment (I use LabVIEW 2014 at the moment) I have set foreground and background to Transparent. Confirmed that it is so in Labview.ini. In the code it starts blinking red when True, and is invisible when False (via Property Node).

Everything is exactly as I want it if I run the VI from the development environment. However, when I build it and run it from the .exe file, the indicator blink red/yellow. It seems that the Transparent setting for True is ignored. Also ignored is my setting of the blink frequency (it runs at the default 1Hz, not at 2 Hz as I want it).

The machine that runs the executable has LabVIEW runtime, not a development environment. I was wondering if anyone has ideas about what's going on?

Thanks

[JÞB]

Blink speed and blink color are properties of the vi not the gobjects.  You may be able to set them on the vi via property node.  However, chech the help file. IIRC neither is run time writable and not available in the RTE. That would mean that you would be forced to use the control's Colors property in the exe and create a new loop to fake "Blinking" on the control you want.

I'm not sure what you expected to see with a blinking object when both colors are the same.  Perhaps you really wanted to invoke highlight on the object?

[Kyle97330]

Anything in the "Options" menu only applies to development.  Some of the options do set initial values for things, but many of them don't "stick" if you compile it, or even move it to a different PC with a different LabVIEW.ini file.

If you want to change a color permanently, use a property node, the properties dialog for the control, or the color tool from the tools palette.

[gmand]

Thanks for the replies! Here is what I want: if the Boolean indicator is false, I don't want it visible (and that works fine). If it's true, I want it blinking red.

I've set the indicator property Red on True, Transparent on False. So if not blinking, no problems there. But once I wire True to the Blinking property, the Foreground/Background colors come in play too.

[gmand]

Thanks, JÞB! My idea (unsuccessful as it turned out) was to set F/B colors to transparent and then control the colors from the properties of the indicator. And that kind of works, except that when compiled, it blinks Red/Yellow, and not Red/Transparent.

[JÞB]

I think that I see the disconnect here.

The blinking property just toggles between 2 foreground colors default red yellow. (Chosen in deference to colorblindness). It has no impact whatsoever on an objects value.

You would have better performance if you set the visible property based on value.

[gmand]

Thanks, JÞB. I did set the visibility based on value: True - visible, False - Invisible. The blinking colors were both set at Transparent initially, but I did try setting foreground to red -- the only thing that became red was the Boolean indicator text. It was still blinking yellow.

I'll experiment a bit more and search for clues in the help again

[RavensFan]

Blink properties for the development environment are set in LabVIEW.ini.

Unless I'm mistaken, the blink properties for an executable are set in that executables .ini file.

[JÞB]

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@RavensFan wrote:

Blink properties for the development environment are set in LabVIEW.ini.

Unless I'm mistaken, the blink properties for an executable are set in that executables .ini file.

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Thanks for checking RF! I was fairly sure that the "Environment " page options were truly specific to the environment ( IDE / RTE)  Sadly my phone has neither so I couldn't play with them.

[RavensFan · Accepted solution]

I just confirmed this. 

If you change the blink colors from LabVIEW default in the development environment, they'll be added to the LabVIEW.ini file as

blinkBGcolor=00AABBCC  where those are the hex characters of the color you chose

blinkFGcolor=00DDEEFF

If you create an executable called MyApplication.exe those colors aren't defined for that instance, so you wind up with the LabVIEW defaults when you run your exe.

To get those special colors in the application, you need to add those lines to the MyApplication.ini file that the Application Builder creates.