LabVIEW journey starting point

[muks]

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Shane Wrote: I started in 1994 (?) with the last LV version not to have an "undo" feature.  That didn't exactly help things for a newbie.....

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With no undo feature??????????????That should have been  really frustrating.On the other hand  it would have helped  you  program correctly the first time.Hmmmmmm no wonder you  are proficient in lv.

[Intaris]

The lack of an undo "feature" was extremely frustrating.  I don't think it really contributed anything to my ability, but it certainly gave me a reason or two to give up altogether on LV early on.

Good thing I'm as stubborn as a mule though.....

Shane.

PS Re. Games.  I used to take on the rest of the lab at Doom (me versus 3 or 4 others in the lab).  I still won thanks to many a sleepless weekend at a friends house spent playing Doom (56k Serial link), Descent (56K serial link), Quake (Network) and so on.  I remember shopping for a new RS-232 card to get up to 115k Baud to enable more fluid gaming.  That and spending 100 pounds for 4MB RAM thinking it was a good deal.....

[johnsold]

I started with LV 1.2 (which was the first real commercial release, I think) in 1989.

The first project was a Startle Response measurement system. It generated tones with random amplitude and frequency followed by a high amplitude burst of white noise. These were presented to rats in small cages which were placed on load cell based scales. When the loud noise occurred the rats were startled and, of course, jumped. The magnitude and timing of the jumps were recorded from the load cells via an 8-bit A/D converter. If the animal heard the audio tone before the burst it would jump less. Think of someone sneaking up behind you and popping a paper bag. If they warn you first or you hear them rustling the bag, you jump less (and spoil their fun!).

This was basically a hearing test. With enough data points the threshold of hearing could be determined as a function of frequency and amplitude. The EPA funded the research as a means of evaluating whether various chemicals had damaging effects on hearing or nerve-muscle interaction. The chemicals could be tested much faster and with fewer animals. They did not need to wait until the animals died of old age to do tissue studies. This system worked with young animals.

The A/D converter, an 8-bit Digital I/O device for controlling the attenuation of the tones, and a function generator to generate the tones were three SCSI devices called MacADIOS (GW Instruments?). We designed and built 27 4.5 inch by 6.5 inch (~115 x 165 mm) circuit cards in a rack to handle the attenuation and pulse timing. We also built acoustic attenuation enclosures so four animals could be tested simultaneously with minimal interaction.

I recall that the software had a 29 frame stacked sequence structure! My boss and I worked about two years to put the whole system together.

Today a direct descendent of that program is in use helping our neuroscientists study how rabbits brains function during learning. Theta waves (3.5-8.5 Hz) in the hippocampus are important to learning. The current version of the program is in LV 8.x, uses a state machine architecture and has no multiframe sequence structures.

Lynn

[muks]

A very intresting journey indeed lynn.Thanx for sharing it.Very astonishing to know that someone has worked on all the version of LabVIEW............

[mikeporter]

Hmmm... Lets see. .. The overall flow was a bit like this:

After getting out of the Air Force I got a job in Massachusetts for a company that made making curious devices called "modems" that you used to attach your ADM3 terminal to a special phone line so it could connect to your main frame computer back at the home office - yes this was a while ago. In any case, at this company I was the lead tech for a new development department and my boss gave me the job of figuring out how to test the products we were going to be developing. I quickly came to see that manual testing didn't work because everybody did even the most simple test differently. The inescapable conclusion was that the testing had to be automatic.

About that time I saw an ad in EDN about this product called LabVIEW. I showed the ad to my boss and he suggested that I look into it. So I called NI, talked to someone about it and asked for a demo - which came on a single high-density 800k(!!!) floppy. When the disk arrived I tried it out and was immediately impressed. So I called NI back to discuss how they might help me to get the software approved - which was $2000 and NOBODY charged that much for software that only ran on a Mac Plus! During the discussion, I must have mentioned that the company I worked for was a division of Motorola because the next thing I knew they were offering to fly an Application Engineer out to help me put together a demonstration. In the end NI stuck Tony Vento (who is still with NI, but definitely NOT still an AE) on a plane, flew him to Boston and he and I put together a simple BERT test application using equipment we has sitting around the lab. Very impressive - to the extent that I got my copy of LabVIEW and a brand new Mac II (with 2 Meg of ram) to run it on.

As I started working with the language I guess I missed the memo that said LV was just for doing small projects - so my first modem test system utilized several GPIB devices, Analog IO, multiple serial devices and a little discrete digital IO. During this time I realized that I had no idea how to design software, but I figured that as a first-pass approximation, I would design code the way I designed hardware: as small reusable modules. At some point, NI heard about my system and one that a fellow named Frank White was building at Draper Labs. He was testing gyroscopes that went into things he couldn't talk about... To see what we were doing NI sent another AE (Ray Almgren this time) to see our systems. I don't know about his experience visiting with Frank but as I showed him my code he just sort of sat there with his mouth hanging open muttering something under his breath about "link tables".

Sometime later (1989) NI decided to put together a conference to let people who were using their two major products (LabVIEW and LabWindows) get together and compare notes. It would be called the National Instruments User Symposium and I was one of the people they called to present a paper. I spoke on how to architect code in a large test network. But immediately after accepting the invitation to present a paper, I was struck with a massive fear: There might be people there who really know how to design software, whereas I was just an engineering tech that had figured out how to do some neat stuff with this package that most people didn't even think was a programming language. So I dove into our engineering library at work and found that people like Parnas, Djikstra, Hoare and other had been saying for years that the proper way to design software was exactly how I was doing it.

So I made the presentation, nobody laughed at me - and life was good.

Since then I have worked all over using every major release of LV that has come out from version 1.02 to 8.5. I also wrote for a magazine for 6 years where I did a comparative review between LabVIEW and HPVee - and I still enjoy writing. This about brings me current - except to acknowledge that the best part of the ride hasn't been the technology. It's the people. People that you get to know and then come to treasure their friendship because they are good people. Folks like Putnam Monroe (who I shared an apartment with for a year), Ben Rayner, Christian Altenbach, JoeLabView, tst, and so many many others.

We have quite a community here...

Mike...

[muks]

Hi Mike,
             Thanx for sharing it. So learnt it all by yourself?I am almost sure that there wouldnt have been a book or a grt guide back than isnt it?

[mikeporter]

There were no books back then, but while fads may come and go, a good design methodology is a good methodology regardless of the specifics of the environment in which it is being applied. Therefore I didn't really learn it all by myself. Rather I has a host of tutors that I learned from - the most significant of which I would have to say is (note: not was) Dr David L Parnas. As far as I know he has never worked with LV, but of you want to know how to design software as an engineering discipline, he can show you.

There's a collection of his papers in print titled "Software Fundamentals" - you can get it from Amazon. The book is well worth the cost, but it's not really a text book in the usual sense of the word. It needs to be read, ruminated on, reread, contemplated and experimented with. This is why after 20 years I am still getting things from his writings that I missed the first dozen or so times I read them.

Mike...

[Dennis_Knutson]

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In the end NI stuck Tony Vento (who is still with NI, but definitely NOT still an AE) on a plane, flew him to Boston and he and I put together a simple BERT test application using equipment we has sitting around the lab. Very impressive - to the extent that I got my copy of LabVIEW and a brand new Mac II (with 2 Meg of ram) to run it on.

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Mike,

It was Tony Vento that got me started! I had been working for a small company doing custom test systems. I had been one of the first to buy LabWindows which at that time was for DOS only. A couple of years later, I was using VB ver 1 with the still relatively new Windows 3 when the new local sales engineer Tony) came to visit. He said that since LabVIEW was ported to the pc, would I be interested in joining something they were calling the Alliance program. I'm glad my first client knew less about LabVIEW than I did.

[Mathan]

Nice to hear our beloved knight's words here.....

I started a project with radar. (Indeed interesting one)..... Its a maintenance project and it was previously established 75% with the help of hardware. With the help of LabVIEW i managed to reduce a big part of the hardware circuit. That time i had less knowledge about this forum. Anyway, i got it worked it out and that superb product/project was now made as a trainer kit and it was flying all over the world (Indonesia, Malaysia, China,.... and the list still goes on....)

Mathan

[muks]

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Dennis Wrote:

it was Tony Vento that got me started! I had been working for a small company doing custom test systems. I had been one of the first to buy LabWindows which at that time was for DOS only. A couple of years later, I was using VB ver 1 with the still relatively new Windows 3 when the new local sales engineer Tony) came to visit. He said that since LabVIEW was ported to the pc, would I be interested in joining something they were calling the Alliance program. I'm glad my first client knew less about LabVIEW than I did.

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Can you tell us the year you did your first LV program dennis? Did you also start with floppies?


Message Edited by muks on 08-11-2008 02:25 AM