Introducing LabVIEW 2009

[parthabe]

Ben, from here, I m wondering... Dont you use the Auto Tool all these years?

[lost_in_translation]

Jeffery P -

Forgive my tardyness for jumping in a bit late here on the topic; a colleauge of mine just forwarded me the link after hewas reading the post and came across the Mathscrip issue.

I must first congradulate your team for improving the Mathscript functionality. I have been anticipating the release of LV2009 specifically just for the update to the Mathscript functionality. Being a MATLAB developer in a former life and now having switched over to LV, there are some inherent problems where I've struggled to implement code using Labview for heavy mathematical computations and so the only solution is to rely on function calls to the Mathscript compiler.

You ask about how people are using the "old version" of your new fancy toolbox and I'm certain you know about mine already as it took your Engineers in China 6 months to discover and fix the error. About 9 months ago (Jan. 27-ish), I was struggling with such a problem, trying to create a 3-D lookup table from some massive 2-D arrays that are being used for hardware control. Having done this in MATLAB before, I know the griddata.m function is a very efficient way of doing this, but I wanted to try and do it all organically in Labview first. I was unsuccessful, even with the help of some of our internal top-dog developers and then with your local field reps...the best solution is Mathscript.

So, I switched to Mathscrip to solve this problem and it provides the correct data, and my hardware moves to the correct coordinates but the function takes approximately 2 mintues to complete on LV8.5 and nearly 30minutes and 60% of my two processers on LV8.6 to return said data. We ran a comparison against MATLAB and it took MATLAB 1.4sec to return the same data using their inherent griddata.m function. Some others had even reported similar issues in the following thread: http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=MathScript&thread.id=697

After working with my favorite inside sales guy, he asked that I forwarding off a few operational chuncks of my code and my data to your apps engineers in China. It took them a few weeks to discover and reproduce my issues and that they began trying to solve it. In July, I got a phone call that the problem was mostly solved and that the response time had be cut drastically. Unfortunately, Geoff didn't know the exact details of the new response time but told me that the fix would be availible for me to try as soon as LV2009 comes out...

so now here I am, patiently awaiting and anticipating the release of 2009 so that I can continue developing this program and complete the project that I started nearly a year ago only to now hear that I'm going to have to try and get my management to pony up a few more bucks on top of the subscription fee for my needs in the coming years?

Frankly, I'm struggling to see how this is going to work out. Obviously I can't deploy a MATLAB license to each system I create, so I'm starting to think that my best bet will be to find or purchase a copy of the MATLAB compiler toolbox and create a compiled version of the MATLAB function griddata.m for this project and perhaps even other functions moving forward...

I appreciate your team wanting to help your customers and "see" who's using the Mathscrip function and in what capacity and get feedback of how you can make it better, but isn't this  why you guys surf the forums and why I can forward you guys my code and speak with your apps engineers? I'm kinda painted into a corner on how I move forward...it's great that I'm grandfathered in this year - thank you for that...but after that I'm not sure. I'm sure my company will pony up year after year so I can continue to use mathscript in my programs...but what if they can't or if we had a smaller budget? I'll go and write this software, but there's the chance that it'll be obsolete in a year when I have to buy the upgrade...and that's unacceptable in a comercial environment.

My appologies to everyone else for burning your eyeballs.

-Scott

[Ben]

New Icon editor

It has changed quite a bit and you can do a lot of cool new stuff but "with adaptability comes complexity".

There is a difference between which mouse button you use to select forground or back ground colors.

You have multiple layers so think about which layer you are work with.

THe "checkerboard" pattern means "transparent" so don't drive yourself nuts trying delete it (like I did).

Ben

[Ray.R]

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parthabe wrote:
Ben, from here, I m wondering... Dont you use the Auto Tool all these years?

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I never got used to it..

<<oldSchool>>

[kmcdevitt]

Drivers and Updates

http://joule.ni.com/nidu/cds/fn/p/lang/en

There are 40 new Drivers and Updates now since start of August.

WOW.  Somebody has been working hard at NI.

Thanks to all of you at NI. 

[Coq_Rouge]

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Ray.R wrote:

I never got used to it..

<<oldSchool>>

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I have given the tool a try, but the auto tool selection was always wrong tool. So I found it annoying and went back to tabbing. And the smile on face came back. 

[Coq_Rouge]

...So this animation should pretty much describe my feelings about that tool

[Ben]

When did the option "Show created constant lables" get added to the Environment >>> "Tips and Labeling" section?

I don't remember seeing that option before 2009. i like it since it has saved some time already.

Ben

[dan_u]

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Ben wrote:

When did the option "Show created constant lables" get added to the Environment >>> "Tips and Labeling" section?

I don't remember seeing that option before 2009. i like it since it has saved some time already.

Ben

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It's there in 8.5, but I haven't seen it either until now 

[10Degree]

Jeffrey,

My company is currently making the upgrade to LV 2009 and have just encountered the MathScript “Productization Bug” that is being discussed in this thread.  I call this a bug because I know there is no way a company would yank product features from the hands of happy customers and then turn around and offer them back to the now unhappy customers for a price.

Separating the MathScript technology from the LabVIEW core platform raises the visibility of MathScript, and the new functionality being delivered with the 2009 release

If by “separating from the core platform” you mean untangling the underlying code and modularizing things, than this is a good idea and will make your job of maintaining and updating the code in the future much easier.  If you just wanted users to know that MathScript exists, write an article in the “Instrumentation” magazine, or highlight it on your web site.

Productizing MathScript allows us to recoup a small portion of our investment, allowing us to focus on new opportunities for the technology

Driving a wedge of distrust between yourself and your paying customers may allow you to recoup some portion of your investment in the short term, but my guess is that it will be a bad deal for NI in the long run.  Working on gaining market share or new happy customers may be a better way to recoup costs.

With MathScript as part of LabVIEW, we really had no idea who was using MathScript, or how.  Productizing MathScript gives us an immediate list of users that we can engage for feedback, feature discussions, and roadmap prioritizations.

You could have just asked who was using MathScript in a survey or posting.  Now, not only do you know who many of the users are, you have also made them mad and the lion’s share of feedback that you will get is customers complaining that they are being nickel and dimed for features that used to be part of the out-of-box product.

If I were NI, here is what I would do:
  1. Continue to ship the Windows version of MathScript as always.
  2. Start selling a MathScript RT module for real-time users as you are doing here.
  3. Better yet, come up with a way to modify, update, and improve LabVIEW that does not include yanking existing features.

Ps. would you please contact the Database Toolkit team and ask them for their Productization schedule for me so that I can start re-writing my database-driven applications using something else?

pps.  Does anyone know how to install or use the 8.6.1 MathScript components in LV 2009?

Thank you,
-cb