LabVIEW
More fodder for a social forum: Hobby uses for Labview
Long ago for a science project in middle school, one of my sons built a LabVIEW application to compare different brands of AA batteries (zink carbon, nicad, alkaline (energizer, duracell, generic, etc.)). We got a handful of 1 Ohm power resistors from Radio shack as loads, then simply measured the battery voltage over time using an AT-MIO card and LabVIEW 4.1.
This was really a great project and had practical relevance due to the typically heavy battery use at that age 😉
The results could be compared at many different levels, e.g.:
How long does it take until the voltage drops below a certain level (e.g. 1V).
What was the total energy stored in each battery
Compare with the price you paid
Describe the shape of the discharge curves
etc.
The cheapest battery (zink carbon) was actually the most expensive because it did not last very long and the voltage started dropping almost immediately. There were significant differences between the alkaline brands and the best performer was actually the costco store brand (Kirkland) which outperformed duracell and energizer at a fraction of the cost. 🙂
Today, many brands got reformulated and there are even more types available (Lithium, Premium alkaline ("ultra"-something, etc.)) so it might be fun to repeat the experiment.
This was really a great project and had practical relevance due to the typically heavy battery use at that age 😉
The results could be compared at many different levels, e.g.:
The cheapest battery (zink carbon) was actually the most expensive because it did not last very long and the voltage started dropping almost immediately. There were significant differences between the alkaline brands and the best performer was actually the costco store brand (Kirkland) which outperformed duracell and energizer at a fraction of the cost. 🙂
Today, many brands got reformulated and there are even more types available (Lithium, Premium alkaline ("ultra"-something, etc.)) so it might be fun to repeat the experiment.
Theoretically, one would think that it should be possible to dynamically generate a runtime executable at built time that ONLY contains items that are actually used in that particular application, but it's probably not worth it. (at least we can now decide whether to include lvanlys and friends). Without runtime included, most of my programs are sub-MB and thus easy to handle.
I agree, todays runtime engine approach is much better than the old 4.1 executables, each weighting several megabytes. Even worse considering that back then a 2GB hard disk was considered big.
(If we had the possibility to generate 20kb standalone executables, we probably would have already seen computer virii written in LabVIEW ;))
Curiously, the runtime size follows something similar to Moore's law. Lets look at the runtime sizes:
LV5.1 ... 2.6MB
LV6.0 .. 10.1MB
LV6.1 .. 14.1MB
LV7.0 .. 20.2MB
LV7.1 .. 32.9MB
Let's all hope that computer technology grows at a faster rate than the runtime size or we'll all be doomed come LabVIEW 20.0 😉
I agree, todays runtime engine approach is much better than the old 4.1 executables, each weighting several megabytes. Even worse considering that back then a 2GB hard disk was considered big.
(If we had the possibility to generate 20kb standalone executables, we probably would have already seen computer virii written in LabVIEW ;))
Curiously, the runtime size follows something similar to Moore's law. Lets look at the runtime sizes:
LV5.1 ... 2.6MB
LV6.0 .. 10.1MB
LV6.1 .. 14.1MB
LV7.0 .. 20.2MB
LV7.1 .. 32.9MB
Let's all hope that computer technology grows at a faster rate than the runtime size or we'll all be doomed come LabVIEW 20.0 😉
