Dynamic front panel

[shayelk]

Hi,
I'm working on a VI that will be used to control a number of RC Quadcopters and cars.
The VI gets the amount of vehicles from tracking tools, and then runs a loop and finds out for each vehicle if it's a quad or a car.
Now that that stage is completed, I want the front panel to display a line of controlls and indicators for each of the vehicles, and have a different line for quads or cars (i.e for quads I need indicators for x, y, z coordinates and a "takeoff" button, while for cars I need indicators for x, y coordinates and a speed limit control).
Is there a way to create the front panel dynamically depending on input?
the best way I found up until now will be using invisible tabs, so I'll have a tab for each number of vehicles containing said number of lines, and then each line would have two tabs (quad/car), and the tabs to display would be picked at runtime.
The problem is that that would require me to set a maximum number of vehicles, and would require a lot of work if I'll introduce a new type of vehicle, so I'd rather have a more modular system.

I would love some fresh ideas about that problem.

Thank you!
Shayelk

[jcarmody]

Use arrays of clusters for each of your device type, rather than putting a fixed number of controls/indicators on your FP.  You can display more than one array element and use a scroll bar if there are too many to display.

Could you show what you've done?  Maybe I'll see that I'm way off base if I see your work.

[NLutz]

Take a look at this: https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-23893

The "Simple Actor Example", which can be found within the .zip file, seems exactly like the kind of thing that you need.

Edit: more resources

NI LabVIEW Virtual User Group: Introduction to Actor Framework: http://www.ni.com/webcast/2551/en/ (Video introduction to AF)

http://ni.com/actorframework (User group and more resources)

[shayelk]

looks great, I'll try it out!
In the example you attached the different controlls are displayed in a number of windows, is there a way of displaying them in a single FP?

thank you!

[JÞB · Accepted solution]

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@shayelk wrote:

looks great, I'll try it out!
In the example you attached the different controlls are displayed in a number of windows, is there a way of displaying them in a single FP?

thank you!

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Yes!

Use subpanels. 

I'm assuming you are LVOOPing the class "RC Vehicle" with children classes of "RC Car", "RC Plane", "RC Submarine.Yellow"...etc?

Just dynamically dispatch the "Control RC vehicle" methods to a subpanel.

OK, "JUST" is an oversimplification..... but that is the way I would look into if it was my project.

[shayelk]

I'm pretty new to Labview so I didn't think of using classes, but now that you said it it sounds like the right way to go, so I'll certainly try getting there. thanks!