Additional NI Software Idea Exchange

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In VeriStand 2009, there was a Generator Engine State channel that can be manipulated to stop or pause stimulus a profile. For example, an alarm and procedure could force a profile to stop. The Generator Engine State is present in VeriStand 2011 but is entirely disconnected from the new stimulus profiles. Thus there is now way to stop a profile from running other than a user action pressing Stop on the profile. This creates a safety concern in some of our systems where we want to use an alarm triggered procedure to abort a profile. Thank you.

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The only way to change channel mappings to control and indicators is to right click on each control to change the channel. The work around is to use alias for each workspace item and them modify the alias from the system definition.

I think another more convenient option would have the operator use the manage items window from the screen tab to select which channels to display on the workspace. It already shows all the channels connected but it would add plenty of functionality if you could change the mappings from this window also.

tldr: Screen>>Manage Items... - ability to change channel mappings

Whenever I delete a signal (whether it's a custom device, user channel, calculated channel, etc.), VeriStand goes through to delete that signal from anything referencing it. This is often nice but at times undesirable because I may plan to add it back again at a later time with a new custom device with the same signal names, for example. The auto deletion of all references means that I'd need to go back to relink all of the broken references even if the missing signal gets restored later anyway. Some of my channels are used in 20+ places.

I'd like to see VeriStand prompt me or give me an option as to whether I want to delete all references. If I choose not to delete the reference, I understand that an error will show up later if I try to deploy or run. Thanks.

I'd like a way to select/deselect dependencies that get sent to the target upon deployment. I understand that all dependencies are necessary for a project to run. However, I deploy one system definition to many targets, and often there are very minor changes that don't need a transfer of all the dependencies which takes time. Also, the fact that the default is to transfer all dependencies means I need to keep every computer updated and sync'd or else a deployment could fail. I'd like the ability to manage which dependencies to transfer and potentially overwrite. Thank you.

VeriStand natively includes several Action VIs that provide the critical ability to run code on the gateway when a certain action is performed. Most often, this is used for executing code that cannot be run on Real-Time but needs to coincide with an event within VeriStand. This can also be achieved with VeriStand services, but is more complicated. I think that additional Action VIs, specifically ActionVIOnDeploy and ActionVIOnUndeploy would be very useful. And I'm sure there are additional ActionVIs that others would find useful.

The built in CAN information channels for timestamp and time difference are useful. However, to detect a dead CAN network, I'd really like to know the time since a message was last received. The time difference doesn't work because it waits for a next frame before computing the time difference. If I have a 10 Hz frame that is not coming in, it will just display 0.10 s even if no new frames come in. I'd like to have a time since the last message so I can detect if the message is no longer coming in. I was thinking of doing a difference between system time and the most recent receive time, but system time is relative to the start of VeriStand while the CAN receive time seems to refer to real world time. I hear that real world time will be available in VeriStand 2012, so we can more easily do this checking in a calculated channel, but it'd be great to have this feature as a CAN information channel. Thank you.

The various Compact DAQ digital IO modules available can be either correlated or not.

However, there is no information regarding this in the various device specifications.

The information is required because a correlated device is required to access the chassis counters.

A comparison table for correlated devices does exist on NI.com (see link below) but the user has to search for it. It would be far more useful if it were included in the device documentation and specifications along with a supporting information.

http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/3114EE73A39F1300862578BE0059A895

I wrote this idea after having spent a lot of time trying to understand a strange connection problem between MAX and NI-cDAQ 9188 ethernet chassis.

As a matter of fact I discovered that MAX uses the proxy settings made inside Internet Explorer (in Tools >> Internet options >> Connections >> LAN settings). If you set a proxy inside IE, MAX uses this proxy trying to connect to a NI cDAQ ethernet chassis.

If you set the same proxy inside Firefox (for example), MAX doesn't use this proxy settings.

For this reason you must tell the customer how to configure the proxy inside IE in order to be sure that MAx is able to connect to the NI cDAQ ethernet chassis. And if the customer has already set the IE proxy as requested for network connection, it could happen that he must change this settings, and this could be a problem.

I suggest that MAX (and other NI software) should have its own proxy settings (has Firefox has) so that it would be possible connecting to cDAQ ethernet chassis even with "strange" settings of IE proxy.

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If you add a NI camera to the computer, Max will recognize that.

The camera is added as Cam0.

In the back a file gets created which includes the Type, Name, Serial number,… of the camera.

If the camera gets broken and you put in a new one it gets added as Cam1. ?!?

If you only have one Camera it will be easy to scan pragmatically and

use the one that you find. But if you have several cameras you get a problem.

For Example:

Cam0

Cam1

Cam2

Cam3

You want to change camera 1 and put it out. Now you put the new one in.

Max creates Cam4 because Cam1 is reserved for the other one.

It is not possible to delete Cam1. Only if you go to the specific folder and

Delete the special .iid file the port is no longer reserved.

Please implement the management of this directly in Max!

I/O Trace is extremely useful when debugging system-level text-based applications. Error handling for systems involving multiple drivers + software packages (RF toolkits, for example) is very difficult. After recognizing there was an error, we still have to determine which device threw the error and then query the appropriate driver/toolkit with the correct handle to determine what the error was. NI I/O Trace is a great way to quickly determine which device threw an error and at which function call. Unfortunately, the error reporting returned by I/OTrace is pretty limited. For example, consider the I/O Trace shown below of an application synchronizing two waveform generators. A property is not configured correctly for one of the generators. I/O Trace clearly indicates there is an error, however the exact cause of the error is difficult to discern from the message:

The actual error message is: “The Sample Rate property can not be configured if OSP Enabled is VI_TRUE. “. It would be great if I/O trace could provide the entire error description. Compare this to the LabVIEW error handler: