How to connect probes to LabView projects?

[OS-Prof]

We use LabView projects to carry around consistent versions of our system from computer to computer. This is great, because it lets us keep different versions of our software separate, so as not to get confused. But it is not so great for our suite of probes that we have built for debugging and analysis.

It seems that LabView has its own default location for probes that is global to each computer, not attached to a particular project. Therefore, the probes do not travel well with the versions of our software that they should be attached to.

How do we make LabView look in the project for the right version of the probe?

In particular, we wish to be able right-click on a wire and have all of the custom probes for that wire type be displayed **FROM THE PROJECT**, not from the default place for probes. The reason for this is that many of our probes invokes utility VIs and subroutines that travel with the project and that get updated as the software evolves. Storing them in the default LabView location causes them to get hopelessly out of date or inconsistent with the software version that we are debugging.

Currently, we maintain a "probe" folder in the project, so that each probe finds the right version of the utility VIs and subroutines. But right-clicking on the wire type does not display these probes, only those in the global location for that computer. This is awkward, because it requires us to manually search for the correct version of the probe each time we want to use it, and we have to manually guess which probe goes with which wire type, etc.

Is there a better way to do this in LabView 8.5?

Regards,

Hugh 

[Kameralina]

Hello,

Probes were not designed to be ported in the way that you speak of, so I am not sure that there is even a way to properly do this.
Could you instead use a different set of indicators to do this?  You could use shared variables even and deploy those so that you can read them all from a central location (Shared Variable Manager).  How exactly are you trying to see all of them.  If we use some creativity, then I am sure that we can find a way to work around this.

Have a great weekend.

[Britoa]

I would actially like to request that probes be that way.  Currently, probes are loaded on labview start (at least in 8.2) and if you made a probe to handle a class of yours, that probe, along with the whole class heirarchy loads when labview loads, even if you aren't going to use that project.  We have a few projects here that have decently hefty class structures, but we can't impliment probes for them, because we don't want to load it all when labview loads.

I understand this is not a current feature, but it would be great to see it in a future version.

As for OS-Prof:  I am pretty sure labview looks in its 'Default Data Directory' when it hunts for probes (Usually mydocs/LabVIEW Data/Probes) so you could possibly put them into a network share, or a default location on disk (c:\lvdata\probes) and that may work

Edit: I don't think it will work... it seems ALL of the data in the default data directory goes with it, and some of it gets written by LV while running.  (I would love this to work, I use two computers right now, and I have a few probes that I find very useful.  I like most my error probe with timestamp, to see when loops run)

Message Edited by Britoa on 06-30-2008 07:09 AM

[OS-Prof]

I would like to second Britoa's request that LabView probes work this way. Specifically, it should be possible to set the default directory (or search path) for probes to be a folder in the current project.

In our current way of working, we keep all of our probes in such folders in our projects, and they work perfectly well that way. They get loaded when a project is loaded. The only problem is that we have to manually remember which probes go with which wires, something that LabView could do much better than we humans. This should be a no-brainer to implement.

Thanks,

Hugh

[Kameralina]

Those are very valuable suggestions.  You can officially file a product suggestion here.  These are each looked at by R&D when newer versions of LabVIEW are developed. 

Thank you!

[Britoa]

Suggestion made, with a link to this thread.