What is the most unorthodox use of LV you have done/seen?

[N2STC]

I am thinking of non-equipment control applications in research, business, HR or anything.  How did it work?  Can you share it?  Was your customer happy?

Stan

[Ben]

Every developer in my office uses a "Task Timer" that helps us change the right customers for our time. It runs in the background and any time someone visits my cube I switch the appropriate task. it works like an assistant tht follows me around all day and write down when I flip from one project to another.

In this thread you will find the "Code capture Tool" that tst and Ton developed with help from Rolf and others.

You will also find the CC & Friends' project where we developed some open code that allows us to easily find the URL of the many emoticons available.

Does my model railroad count?

 

That laptop is running a LV application that controls that chasis of hardware in the background. 

Ben

[johnsold]

Back in the LV 2 or LV 3 days I wrote a 6502 cross assembler in LV.  The project got cancelled just before it was complete, for reasons unrelated to the LV part of the project, so I did not do much testing.

I have also written a slide show program which displays (typically via a projector) a series of images.  It has timed and manual modes, a jump to arbitrary image, and a marker which can be positioned on the image by a click (no shaky laser pointers - which tend to be invisible to color blind individuals), and a timer to keep the presenter from talking too long (or at least letting me know when I have done so!).

I won't mention my Hacker program which reads, displays and modifies any file, usually with unpleasnet results.

Lynn 

[DFGray]

Ben,

It is nice to see I am not the only crazy one!  I wrote a DCC controller with cRIO back in the LabVIEW 7.1 days as a learning project.  I connected the TTL output to a standard Lenz LV102 HO gauge amp and had dual locomotive control from my computer.  I demonstrated it at our internal tech conference and got quite a bit of interest.  Unfortunately, life got in the way and it never got any further.

[CoastalMaineBird]

In 1991-92, I developed a program to acoustically model a compressor piping system.  We modeled these things all the time using electrical components: resistors, capacitors, inductors, etc.

My system allowed the user to select components from a palette (line, elbow, reducer, expander, splitter, etc.) .  Each component modified a 2x2 complex matrix at a given frequency and when your model was built, the program swept the whole thing over a certain frequency range, collected the response matrices into a map of the acoustic impedance of the piping.

It then called a cylinder model (written in FORTRAN, no less) to run the compressor itself, and interact with the piping to determine resonant frequencies and piping losses, etc.

It worked OK, but the data didn't agree with field measurements due to fundamental flaws in the model, and the scientist behind it left the firm shortly after the first tests.  It never went further.

[CoastalMaineBird]

a "Task Timer" that helps us change the right customers for our time.

So how do you get the program to change customers for you?

;-> 

[CoastalMaineBird]

A later re-invention of the acoustic model that I did had to duplicate the functionality of the LabVIEW block diagram:  Dragging items from a palette to a diagram, wiring them up, checking for errors, passing values along the chain, etc.  This was due to politics at the place I worked.  Rather than two days developing VIs to represent the different pieces of pipe, I spent four months re-inventing that functionality in Delphi code.

After the model is built, it is sent to a computer cluster of servers, which are high-end number-crunchers, using LabVIEW.  I wrote the software to handle the cluster functions, including accepting the job, distributing the work among the cluster members, and collating the results. A LabVIEW program on the user's machine retrieves the results and does graphing/printing, etc. 

[CoastalMaineBird]

I coached an apprentice some years ago and he made this version of Tetris.

His first publicly-released program. Has multiple levels, preferences for key assignments and colors. 

[CoastalMaineBird]

I also coached that same apprentice to make TerraView.

It stitches together Satellite pictures to let you see the earth.

It's a link to TerraServer to get sat pics.

A new version is here.

[MattBradley]

The stupidest software I ever developed was one that interfaced with a database and spit out teststand files.  Then they had to make an interface to enter the info in the database software.  It was going to look like the teststand script editor.  But the project got cancelled for obvious reasons.  (I tried to convince them several times that they were being morons, but all I got were dumb looks and an occasional "Are you serious?".) 

Never understood why we were doing the project in the first place.