More fodder for a social forum: Hobby uses for Labview

[Sheldon_Stokes]

I thought I'd post some of what I use labview for when I'm not at work. I guess if I use it in my personal life, I must like it...

The most recent use is to build a sonic belt tension application for my Miata supercharger. It's belt driven and if the belt is too loose it slips and I lose "go", if it's too tight, then I can damage my engine or accessories. I built an application that uses a microphone to measure the resonant frequency of a plucked belt and based on it's mass and span, I calculate the tension. It's being used by a number of other insane folks who also have superchargers as an executable.

I've also been writing a speaker measurement suite complete with, sweeps, impulse response, and the ability to measure Thiele-Small parameters of speaker drivers using an impedance bridge of my own design. It's turning out to be quite a nice suite of vi's.

I've got a lot more, but that's the two main ones. Any others?



Sheldon

[Aaron_G]

In taking pictures of a bicycle event (Rosedale Ride in Austin, Texas), I had a series of photos taken of the riders lined up around a large circular fountain. I took the pictures sequentially standing on the fountain. The resultant, stitched together, image was 18000 pixels wide by 1150 pixels tall. The photo-imaging software that I was using to create a DVD slideshow could not handle the picture, even to zoom in on it and pan it across the screen. Instead, I wrote a LabVIEW application that chopped the picture into a large number of overlapping pictures. It took me about 5 minutes to write. The end result was 100 images that are displayed sequentially in such a way that it looks like the camera was rotating around.

Aaron

[EdDickens]

I wrote an application for my wife that watched her online auctions. She could not find one that worked the way she wanted so I started coding. It only took me a couple hours to get a working application.

It just grabbed the HTML from her profile pages that listed all her current auctions, parsed it and displayed it in a nice format. She could click on any item and go directly to that auction. I had watches in there to alert her if she was outbid or when one her auctions ended. Overall it worked pretty well.

She doesn't do the auction stuff much now, and since the profile page changed, the HTML parsing no longer works. But it was a nice experiment.

I've also written a simple application to preview POP mail on a server. It displays the text of the message and allows you to delete messages directly from the server without actually downloading them. This one never really was completed because Thunderbird has a good SPAM filtering built in.

I'm currently contemplating a "NetNanny" type of application for the kids computer. Not sure how I would do this one yet, but it sounds interesting.

Ed

[altenbach]

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@sheldon Stokes wrote:
I built an application that uses a microphone to measure the resonant frequency of a plucked belt and based on it's mass and span, I calculate the tension. It's being used by a number of other insane folks who also have superchargers as an executable.

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Cool! I bet it could easily be modifed to help adjust the spoke tension when building bike wheels. 🙂

[NeilR]

Excellent thread Sheldon.

I knocked up a chromatic tuner for use primarily with electric guitars but could be used for any stringed instrument. It uses the mic input on the PC and works surprisingly well.

I've often thought that LabView could be used much more widely not just within the test / automation market. Once you realign your brain away from textual thinking (for us C/C++ scribes 😉 ) it is very intuitive and I reckon kids would take to it like ducks to water.

The only problem I've found is that if you try to bundle your handy lightweight app. into an installable exe you end up a huge install package. 😞 ... I guess you can't have everything.

[Joe_Guo]

Here are several of the applications I wrote:

Several years ago, I wrote an application that retrieves emails posted to info-labview email group (filtered so only these emails got through), then parse it so the subject for each replay were shown in a list, click on the list brings up that particular replay and all information (email address, date, etc). A reply button was used to reply emails back to the group. The application also saves each email to file by month/year for archive purpose. I stopped using it after yahoo stopped its free pop3 service, but it's an application I used every day.

Roughly about the same time period (maybe even earlier), I also wrote a stock research tool. Search stock names, retrieve its daily prices and historical prices. It also has a "grab all" mode which grabbed the historical prices of every stock listed on the yahoo finance page.

I have been a longtime command & conquer fun, so when the Red Alert came out so did many trainers (used to modify the units capabilities). Many of the good ones requires a fee and my pocket was empty. I wrote a simple application to meet my purpose and used it many times. It was fun.

I've been using a time entry application daily. It stores the projects, their descriptions, code, start and finish dates, and my daily/weekly time sheet. The database was built using Access. The weekly time sheet can be exported to excel. The database (time table) and the application supports multi-user mode. When a different use logged in, his own weekly timesheet can be displayed and edited. The project database is however accessible to everyone.

-Joe

[Sheldon_Stokes]

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@NeilR wrote:
The only problem I've found is that if you try to bundle your handy lightweight app. into an installable exe you end up a huge install package. 😞 ... I guess you can't have everything.

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I feel your pain, and it's something of a sore subject for me. I would nearly stop coding in C all together if I could build a real executable out of labview. I bug the LabView reps every time I see them to:

1) make executables really stand-alone executables. (my 300K app turns into a 16 meg installer)
2) provide a zoom feature for the diagram


Sheldon

PS quoting previous posts is non-intuitive in this forum....

[NeilR]

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@sheldon Stokes wrote:
2) provide a zoom feature for the diagram

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Yes indeed ... zoom ... the eternal question. 🙂

[altenbach]

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Sheldon Stokes wrote:...(my 300K app turns into a 16 meg installer)

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Sheldon,

I usually tell the audience to download and install the runtime first directly from NI. I am sure NI want them all to create a profile before downloading the runtime from the NI website, but you could also give them the FTP link directly to avoid this hassle.

After that, the installer can be trimmed down to quite a small size. For example, once the runtime is installed, you no longer need to include the runtime. The target computer is also guaranteed to already have the correct InstMsiW.exe file, etc. and it no longer needs to be included (Besides, the LV7.1 installer still adds InstMsi.exe, which is only used for windows versions that are not even supported any more is LabVIEW 7.1 😞 )

For details, have a look at this older thread.

(Maybe LabVIEW will be so prevalent in the future that Windows 2010 will aready include the LabVIEW 12.0 runtime as part of the OS ;))

[THailey3]

Hey Guys!

When I was an intern (back in the day), I wrote a timeclock/earnings VI. The place that I interned at was really picky about not working over 40 hours a week (because they didn't want to pay us overtime). So I wrote a VI that logged your total time at work and gave you an hourglass (tank) that showed you how much time you had left before leaving on Friday. When it hit zero, it would play music out of the speakers. It also gave you up-to-the-second information on how much $$ you had made that day & week. It was fun to go to the bathroom, come back, and realize you had made $5 🙂

Keep up the good posts guys & take care!

Travis H.