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Are 3D Surface Graphs really so buggy?

I've been trying to use a 3D Surface Graph in one of my VIs that I want to run on a PXI-8186 controller in Windows XP mode. The experience is not a pleasant one. LabVIEW seems to crash frequently, and the graph seems to semi-randomly forget changes I mage to its properties (that is, by right-clicking and selecting Properties from the CWGraph3D menu).

It seems quite unlikely that the LabVIEW installation is corrupted; I haven't done much to the stock LabVIEW installation on the controller aside from installing the 7.1.1 patch and upgrading DAQmx to version 7.5 (doing a mass compile as appropriate).

Is this function known to have considerable flaws? Perhaps the video hardware in the controller is not adequate to support such graphing? Perhaps there is an update somewhere that I should be installing? I'm not doing anything particularly exotic with the graph (although my VI does update it with new data fairly frequently).
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"

Is this function known to have considerable flaws? Perhaps the video hardware in the controller is not adequate to support such graphing? Perhaps there is an update somewhere that I should be installing? I'm not doing anything particularly exotic with the graph (although my VI does update it with new data fairly frequently).

"

To the best of my knowledge the CW 3D plot has not been updated in years.

CC reported issues with inverting the scales, and I saw issues with large data sets (? >32,000).

Have you been able to duplicate the crashing on non-PXI controller?

If you stop the updates of the graph, do the crashes stop?

 

General comment:

The CW 3D graph when first released was almost too much for the CPU's of the day to handle. Frequent updates were probably not even concidered pratical. Take a close look at the time format it uses and you will see it expects time in DAYS not seconds. You my be amoung the first people to attempt to use the 3D graph like you are. For that reason I am very curious about the issues you are witnessing and would like to encourage you to keep us posted on what you find. You may be "going where no man has gone before"(The Real Star Trek).

See my entry titled The Leaders Lead" in the LabVIEW Champions blog found at this URL

http://forums.lavag.org/blog/champions/index.php?

for what moral support I can offer at the moment.

Please keep us posted and "watch your nose".

Trying to help,

Ben

 

Retired Senior Automation Systems Architect with Data Science Automation LabVIEW Champion Knight of NI and Prepper LinkedIn Profile YouTube Channel
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Really? I was expecting to learn that people had tried to use 3D graphs and then given up, but it is surprising that few people have used it at all. I would certainly love to use an Intensity Graph for my purposes, but its limitations (namely, X and Y values have to be consecutive positive integers) make it rather unsuitable. If people aren't using CWGraph3D, what are they using? MATLab?

I would not be surprised to learn that CWGraph3D actually requires halfway-decent 3D hardware acceleration, though I daresay it seems rather daft if NI's own hardware platform can't handle such features itself.

Anyway, it's hard to keep track of when the crashes are happening, but I do not think they actually happen while the updates are in progress. It happens more often when the program has stopped, perhaps as a consequence of changing its properties. (FYI, the Z matrix I am wiring has 2048 rows and gets built up column by column.)

I can attempt to document things more thoroughly if there is real interest in this. As I said, my primary interest in posting this thread was to establish whether I should keep fighting with this at all.
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" It happens more often when the program has stopped, perhaps as a consequence of changing its properties."

How's your memory useage?

I have seen crashing when I had huge data sets plotted and I was editing the properties.

I can only judge the usage by the types of questions I have have seen posted re:the 3D graph. The number of Q's related to the 3D graph have increased with CPU capabilities.

Ben

Retired Senior Automation Systems Architect with Data Science Automation LabVIEW Champion Knight of NI and Prepper LinkedIn Profile YouTube Channel
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