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

[Jörn]

I think a really weird programme would be one that reads notes from paper using IMAQ Vision and plays the piano in real time to avoid learning piano.

Joking aside!  I am using LV currently to write a software which ships with a medical instrument. It controls the instrument, does some visualisation and has some basic patient information system included. Does this counts?

Regards, Jörn

[Spectre_Dave]

Back in the good old LabVIEW 2.x days (1990) I wrote a maintenance logging utility to gather the repair data from the Technicians and Print out five (5) forms and update two (2) DataBases.  This was the final step in the PCB repair process at a Nuclear Power Plant.  The boards where then restocked for later use on critical nuclear systems. 

All of the "customers" including Calibration, Quality and NRC reps where happy with the data availability and quality.

[chrisger]

For demonstration purposes we once wrote an application to control the position of an X-Ufo in the air:

http://www.xufo-shop.de/.media/321427186039.png

The device had a gyro sensor which delivered three voltages proportional to acceleration for x,y and z direction. The X-Ufo was connected to a USB-DAQ with a wire umbilical cord. A laptop ran the LV app that calculated the position by the acceleration and returned the control voltages for the four rotators. It looked quite impressive when the X-Ufo returned to or tried to approach the original position after someone snipped against it with a finger (OK, it was not THAT stable, but it looked quite cool!).

[muks]

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This was the final step in the PCB repair process at a Nuclear Power Plant

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That is the most unorthodox use of LV SO FAR......................................... (quoted from simpsons)

[tst]

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Jörn wrote:

I think a really weird programme would be one that reads notes from paper using IMAQ Vision and plays the piano in real time to avoid learning piano.

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Along those lines, last week I wrote a "piano" VI - basically generating a waveform when you press a key and sending it to the speakers (including chords and a visual indication of a piano's keyboard onscreen). The two main issues with it are that a computer keyboard is not very useful as a piano and that in order to avoid clipping you have to make sure the sine wave is closed, which means changing the sample rate for each note.

[Intaris]

In my last job (developing spectrometers) I had a few unusual applications.  We designed and manufactured our own diffraction gratings.

I wrote as VI to take the output from another program of mine (interpreting SEM pictures) in the form of XY plots of individual periods of a diffraction grating, calculated the rotation of them, allowed the user to shift phase of the XY plot and then exported it in GSE format for an optical raytracing program (GSolver).  The GSE format takes "slices" of the profile and several tricks were required because small artefacts in the height produced some very noticeable deviations in the calculations so there was a minimum width requirement for any segment and so on.

Sounds kind of silly but this actually allowed us to take SEMs of dispersion gratings, measure them from the pictures, generate files for calculation and then compare the results of the calculation to real-world measurements in order to give feedback for the next round of grating manufacture.  This "closed the loop" so to speak and increased our effectiveness manyfold.

Shane.

[LabViewGuruWannabe]

I kinda liked my LabVIEW Xmas screensaver. Completely useless...

http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=170&message.id=292016&query.id=113945#M292016

[chrisger]

This one's great : http://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-5073 (contributed by RER)

[Mike_at_Signal.X]

I score my son's Pinewood derby with RaceVIEW every year.  Written in LabVIEW!

http://www.raceview.com/

Message Edited by Mike at Signal.X on 09-07-2009 11:15 PM

[chilly_charly]

What would you do if your refrigerator broke down right in the weekend, during the hottest summer day ? Of course the fridge was an expensive model, out of guarantee for a couple of months. This kind-of Murphy's story really happened to me two years ago.

Guess what ?

I found out the relay switch to control the compressor, wired it through the ceiling, down to my home desk, to an NI-USB 6009 borrowed from my lab and draw a Q&D vi to switch the compressor on and off. That way, I managed not to run out of cold beer and to keep my wife happy. Then I spent a few more time to find out that the temperature sensor was a simple 10K thermistor, used two more wires and updated my clock-controled vi into a nice PI controler.

It took 2 weeks before I got the replacement part.

Not too bad for a grumpy old bio-engineer.

The fridge is still running (fingers crossed). I have left the wires in the ceiling. Just in case...