More fodder for a social forum: Hobby uses for Labview

[Ben]

I must have been out of town when this thread was active. Model Railroading has got to be one of the most technically challenging hobbies. It is being discussed in this thread.

http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=BreakPoint&message.id=296#M296

In that thread I posted an example that demonstrates how to display a 3-d landscape. It uses a CW 3-d graph and may be of interest for other types of applications.

Ben

[Conseils]

I knocked up a bi-cycle training simulator in LV 4 under Windows 3.11 for a colleague from a load of old bits we had ready for the junk yard. It seemed a shame to scrap all that hardware. I refused to write it in VB, it would have been a lot smaller foot print but I hope one day we might upgrade the computer and thus the I/O.

I scraped up all the old memory I could find, all 16 Mega bytes (I thought I should write it down for those whose frame of reference was Giga bytes). There was an old data acquisition board in the P.C. which I used the IN/OUT LabView functions to program the 8255 PIO and A/D chips on the ISA board. There were no drivers as the board pre-dated all that kind of exotic software. I had to dig out a full blown 386DX as LabView 4 doesn’t seem to work on less than a 386DX. The 387 maths co-processor emulators that I tried with the 386SX would allow LV to start but then cause LV to hang. Full restart needed then. The disk is 512 Mega bytes and the CPU clocks in at a scorching 50 Mega Hertz.

I used a magnetic sensor to pick up the crank pulses (we hope to move to optical if we find some sensors in the bin from the production department). Then the smart bit came, my colleague has one of those heart monitor sensors that links to a watch so I searched the internet and found (http://www.ricksunfinishedstuff.com/index.html - the link is dead now) you can quite easily pick up the signal with a 5kHz filter. You get a 5kHz burst with every heart pulse. I hacked some software together and I am working out a system (in the background honest) to allow us to have a little cyclist pedalling on the screen such that he can pace you. I think I can base it on that robot example in the demo software I vaguely remember seeing. The point about the watch; was of course safety. As I wanted heart rate but how to get it safely into the computer, with no risk of electrocuting a sweaty rider!

The bike sits on one of those training resistance wheels and he uses it in the winter to keep in shape, all this was just to pass the winter with a bit more fun - for both of us. He was training for a 40km cross country skiing competition, down hill skiing for me. My signal generator covered some kilometres though!