Additional NI Software Idea Exchange

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In the everyday life of a SW developer, it comes again and again to the fact that problems arise, and must be solved.

 

It must be weighed again and again whether a problem resulted from own errors or whether the cause of a problem is to be found by errors in the development environment or in used modules such as xNET, DAQmx etc.

 

It happened to me several times in the past that I looked for errors in my own LabVIEW source code, but afterwards I realized that the cause of the problem was a malfunction in LabVIEW or in one of the used drivers.

 

In order to become aware of possible problems as early as possible during this troubleshooting process, it is important to be actively informed about possible problems inside of the NI Modules.

 

For example, it would be helpful to be notified with an email in the following cases.

- A new entry in the Known Issues and Bugs list

- The new possibility of a workaround

- Availability of a bugfix in a new LabVIEW or driver version

 

My suggestion would be the following:

Would it be possible to provide within the NI account settings a list of modules in which you can choose the notifications for the different Modules?

 

John_Wire_1-1654263264557.png

Whenever something in the known issues has changed the NI account member would get a notification via E-Mail.

 

It would also be possible to make entire subgroups or subject areas selectable.

The technical implementation is certainly possible in different ways. Crucial is that there is the possibility of an active notification for changes in the different known issue lists.

 

NI TSM installs the attached code for simulating chassis and modular instruments that don't already have simulation plugins to MAX provided with their drivers.  There's no reason I can tell that this functionality should be limited to NI TSM given that modular instruments are used outside of TSM (and TestStand) all the time.  Please add this simulation capability to NI MAX!

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The Update Service supposedly already checked in the background and found I needed updates.  

Yet when I say “view updates” it makes me wait on a progress bar while it checks for updates.  

And then when I click “Upgrades and Service Packs” it has to check AGAIN with another, extra-slow progress bar.

 

It should just do all the checking in the background, retrieve the full list of updates, and stop interrupting our work to wait on progress bars.

The current Device Driver Installer dialog is not obvious to use. First of all you have to figure out which drivers that you need for your products and then you would probably prefer to remove other unnecessary drivers. However, this is a tedious process with a lot of dependencies. 

I have seen many people just installing everything (with its drawbacks) to be safe, eventhough they only needed the NI RIO driver.

Picture2.png

I'd like to see a more user friendly dialog where drivers are automatically selected.


My suggestion is that the user instead filters out the drivers on a product level like this:

Picture1.png

Let say you choose Modular Instruments. Then next page could let you filter on what type of instrument you have; Scopes, FlexRIO, DMMs, RF, Switching etc...

 

One of the buttons in the bottom would be something like "Add more products?" so you could iterate this process and finally all needed drivers would be filtered out.

 

What do you think?

/Pelle - NI Sweden

To be specific, I am talking about the link below from the 3.x NI License Manager (this is on a VM I use for LV 8.5 development)

Web Activation.png

 

It had the nice feature of filling in your computer's information and all the products you are activating as part of the link.  Unfortunately, NI's website no longer supports this pre-filling - using this link in 3.x now just redirects you to the normal result of typing in ni.com/activate into your browser.

 

My typical workflow with this screen would be to enter my real serial number into the preceding dialog, use this dialog to get the activation link, go back to the preceding dialog and enter in a fake serial number, press next twice to get the activation codes entry dialog, and copy the activation codes into the dialog.

In NI License Manager 4.x, you either need to use web activation (which saves your serial number everywhere) or enter codes manually, requiring a trip to http://ni.com/activate for every product that needs activation (and trying to figure out how the name of an application in License Manager - say "Vision Development Module Runtime" - matches against the website's entries - say "Vision Development Module", "Vision Development Module (FRC)", "Vision Development Module Runtime (FRC)", and "Vision Runtime") and a bunch of e-mail spam if you choose to get a copy of the activation e-mailed to you.  Note that activating LabVIEW alone requires two of these trips (or at least used to), as the Professional Development system and the Application Builder activate separately.

 

As far as why I often don't want to use the built-in Web Activation, it stores your serial number on the computer.  This leads most (I think LabVIEW 2017 is an exception) versions of LabVIEW to display your serial number in their splash screens and about boxes - this could be visible in a public setting or at a customer site.  It also stores the serial number even after you deactivate it, so if you temporarily activate a tester while you are doing its initial debug, your serial number will be stored for your customer to reactivate (and possibly distribute).

 

I labelled this as MAX, as there is no License Manager Idea Exchange - in a way this applies to all NI products.

Hello,

 

It would be nice to add a tool like RAD (NI Replication And Deployement utility) directly into MAX.

But a RAD compatible with all Targets LabVIEW Runtimes.

 

... a kind ok target cloner, saver , restorer ... Smiley Happy

 

Rad.png 

 

Manu.

This is a bit of a feature request for the service request manager and/or as a stand-alone (my NI web) tool!  

 

It is needed because the NI webpage makes it terribly hard to search for CAR#'s and a CAR# is only listed when solved, and only listed for the one version where it was resolved, making it nigh-on impossible to check lists of (new) CAR#s and get notified when they are resolved.

For example, I know this CAR exists, but I'm not sure if it has been resolved and the NI search just didn't find it, or if does not exist (user input error for example) or anything..

no car in search.png

 

  1. The tool should reside on "my NI" but it should be possible to export/share the list of monitored CAR's (so colleageus/companies can maintain one master list of company relevant CAR's).
  2. The tool should connect/check against NI (ideally directly to a back-end database) and return any "public" information related to a CAR, such as "in progress", "known work-around", "details" etc. along with driver/software version where it was resolved (if any).
  3. The tool should present a clear list (ideally with green checkmarks / red cross icons) showing the status of each CAR and maybe a synopsis/one-liner from the description to indicate what problem the number is for.
  4. wish-list added feature:  allow (on a per user basis) the user to add personal notes to a CAR (e.g. this affects projects x, y and z, once resolved, refactor those projects to remove performance intensive work-arounds!) or similar.
  5. e-mail notification (optional/configurable) when the status changes on any of the tracked CAR's.

 

 

As far as how it relates to the service request manager, I would prefer a separate tool but that it also can link to the service request manager as outlined below:

 

A small but significant number of tickets either relate to, or create one or more CAR#'s (or at least mine seem to create a large amount of CAR's).

When a support tech adds / associates a ticket# with a CAR#, ideally this CAR# would be automatically added to the user's CAR Tracking list..

 

In addition it would be great if the back-end database tracked CAR#'s and offered up a list of these numbers in the webpage overview, for example next to the "status" column. Taking it a step further, it would be very nice if NI could make it simpler to check if a CAR has been resolved and if so, what version of LabVIEW it was resolved in/with. This information could be displayed in the same web page table, or a new page to itself. The "Status" column could then also be expanded with a green check-mark if (all) associated CAR#'s have been resolved..

 

Tracking CAR's and manually trying to search and check them off lists locally is labor intensive, especially since the web-page "search" does not do even a passable job when you enter CAR numbers.

For security reasons, many customers using Volume License Manager to administer licenses to client machines do not authorize users to download and install anything from the web. Therefore, if a critical patch is released, the client machines are unable to download this unless it is distributed by the administrator. It would be useful for the VLM administrator to be able to configure the Update Service such that all Users can run the Update Service but the service has been configured to point to an internal network share rather than an internet location outside the firewall. This way, the administrator could make critical updates and patches available for the client machines and the clients can be notified and install them.

In a database (DBC or xml), signal could have a long name property. This property is not avaible in Xnet databse editor or in LabVIEW. That could be a probleme when several signal have the same first 32 character.

Always with Xnet, when reading signal value (or reading frame and convert frame to signals), the result is always a number. In database, some signal have a convertion table to string for a better understading

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In certain circumstances it would be helpful to see exactly what license file ties to each piece of activated software within NI License Manager. This would be an additional field in the right hand pane of License Manager as shown below.

 

 

License Manager Idea.PNG

Hi,

 

Today we need to configure the hardware in MAX and in System Explorer.

 

Allow VS to import the hardware configuration from MAX and eliminate the DIO number of ports and port size manual definition.

 

I guessed the PXI2569 and PXI2570 configuration in a trial and fail matter till I found the number that did not cause an error during deploy.

 

Import all board I/O configuration and let the user remove what is unused later.

 

Cheers,

CHCastro

First time poster here so please excuse my ignorance if I am posting incorrectly.

 

I know NI supports CentOS and SUSE GNU/Linux distributions, but Debian distros are the most popular according to distrowatch.  I would like NI to consider creating 488.2 driver support for Debian based distros.  Specifically Linux Mint and Ubuntu.  I have been using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and recently switched to Linux Mint 18.3.  Mint 18.3 works so well, I abandoned Windows 7 on my personal computer and only use Windows 7 at work (because I must).  I can use NI USB devices on Mint (and Ubuntu) by installing the driver in a Windows 7 virtual machine and passing through the USB in VirtualBox.  However this does not work for PCI cards.  Drivers are a big roadblock to migrating our test equipment off Windows so I am hoping NI considers better GNU/Linux development in the future.  Thank you.

It would be good if MAX was able to report the serial number of the PXI chassis and PXI controller, if they are applicable.

Why don't we integrate PuTTY or some version of it into MAX? "Console out" is powerful troubleshooting tool for all NI RT targets and more because it tranfers vital information such as errors and IP address information regardless of whether you can find the device in MAX. It's especially useful for devices that don't have hardware dipswitches. It's a great tool, but is useless without a program like PuTTY. Hence, my suggestion remain to integrate PuTTY or some form of it into MAX. 

 

http://www.cnet.com/1770-5_1-0.html?query=extra+putty&tag=srch

Hi

I would like to be able to simulate XNET devices in MAX (with minimal support). I would not expect these devices to simulate data on the bus. They could help us developers catch some bugs before we integrate with the actual HW.

 

It would be easier for a developer to be able to create configuration files, databases and test them out without connecting to the actual HW. In most cases, the HW is on a rig which is in use, or the HW is not yet delivered for the rig. We would not need any data on the bus in these cases.

 

I have been struggling over the past few months, to be able to define databases or use databases and test my configuration UI without the actual HW. And I have faced lot of error with creating multiple sessions, opening sessions after the HW is reserved etc.

 

I would hope that such errors could be tested and fixed using a simulated device, where the actual messages on the bus are not important.

 

I was thinking for very large systems that use the same channel configuration for multiple channels on the system configuration can be very tedious. A work around for this is the API to build a system definition file but for those customer's with limited or no LabVIEW or .NET experience this isn't valid. 

 

Since we can test the IO channels in MAX by creating tasks for all of our hardware I would like to add the ability to pull the configuration information from a task we've created in MAX and apply them to our channels in VeriStand. So in stead of setting MIN, MAX, input configuration, shunt resistor location and value for 100 channels I can configure it in one location (MAX) and apply the settings to all my Current Channels. Task configuration.PNG

The other issue is if the channel doesn't support all the configurations from each page then we need to contact NI support to add functionality. Recently I worked with a LVDT sensor for a SCXI chassis. This allows customers to have an instant workaround rather than having for NI to allocate resources to update the page.

 

Current VeriStand.PNG

 

By adding MAX task to act as the template for our channels we can edit the parameters for all channels of the same setup from one location (MAX) vs each individual page. This also allows you to test individual channels instantly in MAX to make sure the configuration is valid without resolving other errors across the whole system definition.

MAX Task for VeriStand.PNG

 

Again this is more for deployments where they have 100s of channel similarly configured where configurating each channel is tedious but they are not unique.

Posted this in Data Acquisition Ideas as well, but it seems like it would be implemented with something like MAX, so...

 

When dealing with various remotely deployed cRIO hardware configurations, it may be impossible to keep a sample configuration of every type of system we ever sell.  Unfortunately, if upgrades or revisions are made to the base code in our system, remotely deploying to our customers becomes impossible unless we have their exact configuration on-hand for the programmers to compile.  Remote connection to the hardware for this type of operation is also not typically possible.

 

To be able to simulate or emulate a full cRIO system (processor & hardware modules), then compile the RT code for deployment on that system as if it is physically connected to our development system would be ideal.  This would allow images to be created, which can be sent to customers for local deployment at their facility.  Dramatic decrease in "hardware library" requirements on the development end, reduction in "on-site upgrade" service trip costs to the customers.  Plus, easier for OEMs like me to justify the move away from PLC types of hardware and towards cRIO, once you take away some of the potentially nightmarish continued support and update issues involved with basing systems on cRIO platforms.

Hi,

 

the company I work for designs automotive infotainment products, and we used products from NI extensively in product validation an testing, including TestStand, Labview, DIAdem, FPGA, RT. etc...

 

In order to simplify license management, we chose to used the NI Volume License Manager (VLM).  This provides centralized managment of licenses, including easy addition and removal of licenses, as well as license recovery from PCs no longer in service (broken or decomissioned by IT).

 

Since I am the technical lead for test system development, it falls to me to perform license capacity planning, request disconnected licenses, manage license groups, and all the other administrative things that go with license management.  I am not, however, in the IT department, and since the VLM runs on a Virtual Machine inside the VM park, I always have to request license changes from our IT specialists. 

 

I would very much appreciate it if there were a tool to remotely administer the VLM.  This would allow the IT department to give me access to just the VLM to perform administrative duties there, sort of like the MMC in Microsoft Windows Server lets users administer remote servers.  

Currently licenses use the sort key word within a server's license file to specify the priorotized check out of similar software products ( a preference to check out DIAdem professional over DIAdem Advanced for example when a user has permissions for both).  With concurrent licenses, right clicking on a software product from a client's License Manager application and selecting the Do not Allow License Request from the context menu as shown below will also bring about this functionality.

 

Without a set preference, sometimes two licenses are checked out, and this is a known issue:

 

DIAdem is double-checked out from VLA when several versions are licensed

http://forums.ni.com/t5/NI-Applications-Engineers/DIAdem-is-double-checked-out-from-VLA-when-several-versions-are/td-p/2139600

 

Do Not Allow License Request for Concurrent License

 

Concurrent.png

 

 

 

Sort Keyword Within a Server's License File

 

ServerLicense.png

 

 

 

My suggestion is that we create a way within VLM to modify the server's *.lic file (by changing sort key word's value) to reflect software check out priority.  Currently this change can be made by manually modifying the sort value in the server's *.lic file.  This works since the server's license doesn't need to be resigned after said modification.  However, it would be nice if this change could be made through the VLM user interface and the *.lic file would be modified behind the scenes.

 

 

Feel free to comment or Kudo!

 

Cheers!

 

Shawn S.

There should be an option in MAX to be able to show remote systems by hostname, OR by IP address.  

 

hostname.pngOR  IP_address.png

 

When managing several targets it can be very hard to keep track of which target has which IP address and it is incredibly tedious to look through every target to determine it's individual IP address.