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

[PaulG.]

You are such a showoff, Ben.

But one of our greatest.

I don't have the room for a train set, but I still LV at home for fun.

I don't know if it would be considered "unorthodox" but a few years ago I wrote an "end of the world" program in LV that will translate text messages into Morse code. I got inspired after watching the movie "Independance Day". I can type in a message into a text box, press "send" and the dashes and dots go out ... in standard Morse code format. It was pretty easy but still very cool if I can say so myself.

THAT was probably as much fun as what you are doing with your trains.

[chrisger]

Hi there

Back in 2001 i wrote a latex generator for a friend of mine who was a little bit late with his diploma thesis. He had ~100 pictures in his document, the generator took the names and captions of the pictures from a text file and generated the latex files. At these days i was his hero.

[Ben]

---

PaulG. wrote:

You are such a showoff, Ben.

But one of our greatest.

I don't have the room for a train set, but I still LV at home for fun.

I don't know if it would be considered "unorthodox" but a few years ago I wrote an "end of the world" program in LV that will translate text messages into Morse code. I got inspired after watching the movie "Independance Day". I can type in a message into a text box, press "send" and the dashes and dots go out ... in standard Morse code format. It was pretty easy but still very cool if I can say so myself.

THAT was probably as much fun as what you are doing with your trains.

---

I am supposed to keep that under control.     

It sorta funny that Steve mentioned TerraVIEW in this thread where mention of the train layout was made. My partner in crime for the railroad (he rents the other side of the duplex from me and it is his den where the layout is installed) was quit interested in the images TerraVIEW gave us since they had details of our neighborhood that had fallen into forgotten history. The maps from TerraVIEW taught more about the right-of-way for the now defunct Montour Railroad then we had ever known. My house is an old miner's home and sit on the hill oposite the portal for what was the most productive mine in the world durring the second world war. A good portion of the steel that went into that war came out of that mine. Both my buddy and myself had found and were mysitified by ruins we found in the woods behind our houses as kids. THe maps on TerraVIEW cleared up thos mysteries and also answered the question "how did they get the slag from the mine on that side of the valley to the slag dump on our side. Answer: A Skip hoist spanned the valley, explaining those strange fondations in the woods.

SO this inspired our "Next layout" which will be a scale model of the Montour Railroad taht will amoung other things include the chiken coop where my mother was born. And since we are both impatient people, we decided we would add a WORKING N-scale skip-hoist (we had to machine our own pulleys and windlast. An N-Scale skip hoist bucket is about 1/3 the size of a pencil eraser) to feed our model balst furnace (not yet under LV control).

Future plans for the Railraod involved complety re-writting the control software. The version I am using to control it now was really just an oppertunity for me to learn how to do custom GUI based on the Picture Control and a "proof of concept" to prove to my buddy that we don't have to run the layout under Basic.

The re-write will help me learn LVOOP since I intend to implement full automatic control of up to seven (limited by our block matrix control hardware) trains simultaneously with collision avoidance. This has always been a challenge I have been avoiding but now that I have LVOOP, I may be able to model* my way through it. It is just part of the self imposed training* I put myself through.

Ben

* Puns intended

[tst]

LabVIEW is certainly not limited to measurement and control applications. I've seen people do all kinds of things with it. I've also done the odd game or web-page-parsing-and-downloading VI. A couple of commercial examples that come to mind are JKI's VIPM, which is used to manage and distribute LV code, and a shipping management system we built in LabVIEW.

[jaredforshey]

May not fit the bill of "non-equipment control", but I made a turtle food dispenser to feed my aquatic turtle while I was away for a few weeks.  The program let me schedule feedings and take webcam snapshots of the aquarium a number of seconds after the feeding event so I could make sure food had in fact been dispensed.  The webcam was necessary because the feeding mechanism I had thrown together consisted of a hobby servo that could invert and then "shake" a water bottle with a narrow hole in the cap filled with pelletized food.  Amazingly, the dispensing was largely consistent but still occasionally failed due to bottlenecks in the, er, bottleneck.  If the snapshot showed that no food had been dispensed during that day's feeding, I'd just hit the button a few times to shake the obstruction loose.  I used VNC to connect to the computer remotely from hotel wifi. 

 I was pretty happy with it considering it was assembled from on-hand materials.  

[Ben]

This link will take you to an earlier thread with related ideas from a couple of years back. I have been trying to find it but was using the wrong search criteria. Eventually I tried "rodent" and "matt" to find this one.

Ben

[Cory_K]

I acutally just finished a project (for fun) that would fit in this catagory (of course with the help of the forums).

My brother was teaching himself to play the piano, and found reading the sheet music in real time was a lot of trouble.

So I wrote this program, which will read a 'MIDI' file, then play the piano in real-time.

The keys are lit up in red as they are played, and the notes are played to sound identical to a piano.

You can also specify a retardation factor for the music, if playing it slower helps you see what is going on.

[Wayne.C]

Helping co-worker develop a .vi to track competitor info and scoring for amature diving competitions.  Hope to make a big splash.

[ctardi]

Similar to tst, we use a labview to fill some holes in our shipping/invintory tracking programs...that's about the oddest thing I've seen it used for at work.

I saw it used on Mythbusters to control an MRI machine...that was kinda cool. 

At home, I use it for web page scraping a fair bit, as well as am working [slowly] on using it to control a cnc mill.

[muks]

We developed a project for inspecting diesel engine. We had 9 cameras and a sophisticated automation in place. Did I just say sophisticated?

Well the each engine weighed around 900 pounds. No problem with that finally but imagine testing it. I used to run a vi and close my ears and engine will be in place with a B-A-N-G. Well bang is aa understatement . There were times when the engine will be too oily . I introduced a delay of 3 seconds. I used to run the vi and run for a cover. Got a feeling of simulating a time bomb. The only thing missing was some black stripes on my face!!!!!!!!!!!!