Random Ramblings on LabVIEW Design

As the postponed NIWeek fast approaches my DSH friends thought it would be nice to mark the occasion by putting on some virtual meetings and this idea blossomed somewhat. This here will be the rough agenda for #VIWeek, come join us..

And keep checking back, the agenda will hopefully get filled up over this week.

If enough people are interested I can do a webex session on my ODF tools and ODF file structures. I've found these incredibly useful with the capability to generate reports and spreadsheets from RT as well as auto-generation of internal documents and customer reports.

We've had some nice feedback on our general template design, including our way of doing state-machines. Which is an unexpected pleasure in these ugly times. The best thing about the feedback is that the feedbackers explain why the design worked in language not our own. And that gets my brain going....

Something a little different for this article, we have a guest writer!. My colleague at DSH Workshops Joerg Hampel discussing how he took my State Machine stuff and made a lovely PlantUML visualisation tool for it (also made it using user events rather than queues). It's pretty damned cool..

There is a lot more talk about design reviews, code reviews and project postmortems and that is brilliant. Some of what I hear is slightly inaccurate and this article seeks to clarify..

Sometimes it's easier to dump design decisions on your users than to try and write code to satisfy complex and conflicting requirements

Here's some techniques we use.... and a little gift

Over the years we have made a lot of systems, I thought I'd share some of the useful circuits we've delivered as part of them.

This first one was used as a battery back-up for a monitoring system monitoring Azipods on ships..... read on to find out what an Azipod is.

Company Announcement: SSDC has become an NI Center of Excellence!

What does that mean then?

Here's how we use databases at SSDC (if we're left to our own devices). Talking SQLite and MySQL here.

05-Feb-2020 Added MySQL TCP Driver LabVIEW 2015 - Example.vi shows example connecting to an open dB

On 1st January 2000 I joined SSDC, here's what's happened in the last 20 years....

Let's see what we have in store for 2020 shall we...

For more information please reread the title

I'm old and here's my take on it....There's some very sound advice in here.

Something I have noticed in the world of computer science and process management. Talking to friends in nutritional science and sports psychology it appears this thing is common.

You MUST provide a full set of requirements and changes later on are terrible, expensive and will cause over-runs!

Really?

I mean Really?

I know it's a bit counter-intuitive, but I think this may be one of the more important concepts in my lil' blog.

While we wait for the vids to be edited I thought I should put the presentation in article form here.

The example code and eventually the video will be put here too.

Not a review really check James Macs Review here for an actual review (agree word for word with it)...

Some exciting news....

While working on a Tow Tank data Acq system I needed to use a technique shown to me by Dr James Powell (such a clever man!). I reckon it might be useful for you lot to know it too...

Much fun was had, actual business was done!

This is mainly a personal diary for my records, feel free to look at something more technical.

In this polarised political world the poor old centrist seems to be hated by all, but is a moderate approach the only way to design well?, let's find out....

Top-down, Bottom-up which is correct?

One of the great things about the CLA summits is that there are 200 creative people in a room who generally like and respect each other. This can be a great place to shape the language of our design medium. This article describes something I would love to have, so much so I mocked it up....

Ego gets a bad rap, NOT ON MY WATCH it doesn't. It's a fragile thing that needs tending like an Orchid garden and when it blossoms it's a beautiful thing!

Don't normally do a news dump, but I have a lot of it so.....

GDevCon#2 Tickets...

Podcast...

Travels...

NIWeek....

Book...

Work...

We hear that our block diagrams should be readable, but is that enough. I think the term "readable" is subjective and needs additional information. To this end I think block diagrams should be "at a glance" readable.

Here's some ways you can do this.

A very common sentence I hear when people open up their code to me is "Sorry, it's a bit......". Which is interesting, because I love showing off my code. Am I a sociopath  who loves to inflict shock and horror in peoples faces, or do I just have pride in my work.

Let's have a look at this.

By popular demand this is an index to all my articles specifically about LabVIEW, that should always be floated on top. I copied it from article 70. This will be the one I update.

Listen to your manager or spend 5 minutes on LinkedIn and you will finding yourself striving to give 100% or sometimes even 110%. I've even seen times where 110% is not enough and you have to give 200%.

As well as being mathematically impossible and stupid this maximising of effort is actually bad engineering and even worse design.

Here's some examples of where 100% is just wrong.