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The recently introduced Raspberry Pi is a 32 bit ARM based microcontroller board that is very popular. It would be great if we could programme it in LabVIEW. This product could leverage off the already available LabVIEW Embedded for ARM and the LabVIEW Microcontroller SDK (or other methods of getting LabVIEW to run on it).

 

The Raspberry Pi is a $35 (with Ethernet) credit card sized computer that is open hardware. The ARM chip is an Atmel ARM11 running at 700 MHz resulting in 875 MIPS of performance. By way of comparison, the current LabVIEW Embedded for ARM Tier 1 (out-of-the-box experience) boards have only 60 MIPS of processing power. So, about 15 times the processing power!

 

Wouldn’t it be great to programme the Raspberry Pi in LabVIEW?

I occasionally hide controls on my FP and control their visibility programmatically during the execution of my program. The problem is that if I edit my UI and the control is hidden, it's very easy not to be aware that it's there and to accidentally overlap it, hide it or even move it off the screen.

 

To solve this, I usually try to save the VIs with all the controls visible, but that's not always feasible.


A better solution - LabVIEW should always show hidden controls in edit mode. It should just have some way of differentiating them from visible controls. This mockup shows them as ghosts, but it can also be any other solution:

 

20779iD19E3A04FFDC0A31

 

In run mode, of course, the control would not be shown. This is similar to the black border you get when objects overlap a tab control.

Browsing through menus to replace a numeric conversion node is tedious.  How about allowing the selector tool to select from a pull-down menu, just like it does from an unbundle by name node?

 

Existing unbundle node behavior is shown at left.  Desired numeric conversion node behavior is to the right.

 

Quick_changing_of_numeric_comments.png

 

 

  It would be very usefull to know which VIs are still running.

   aaaa.png

The problem that height of local variable is 17 pix, and terminal - 16 pix, but distance between terminals in unbundle function is 15 pix.

As result - aligning to vertical compress caused steps in wires:

 

Screenshot.png

 

Right nowterminals/local variables should be slighly overlapped for "step edge free" wiring.

Please synchronize size of these icons with distance between terminals (to 16 pixels - seems to be ideal size)

 

Not sure if it was already in Idea Exchange or not.

 

Andrey.

 

Currently, having one misconnected wire breaks the entire wire tree and pressing ctrl+b wipes out everything. Poof!

 

In the vast majority of (my) scenarios, a broken wire is due to a small problem isolated to one branch so it does not make sense to drag the entire wire from the source to all valid destinations down with it and break everything in the process.

 

Here is a simplified example to illustrate the problem (see picture).

 

 

In (A) we have mostly good code. If we add a wire as shown, that wire (and VI!) must break of course because such a wire would not make any sense.

 

However, it does not make sense to also break the good, existing branches of the wire (the cluster in this case), but that is exactly what we get today as shown in (B). If we press ctrl+b at this point, all broken wires will disappear and we would have to start wiring from scratch (or undo, of course :)). Even the context help and tip strip is misleading, because it claims that the "source is a cluster ... the sink is long ...", while that is only true for 25% of the sinks in this case!

 

What we should get instead is shown in part (C). Only the tiny bad wire branch should break, leaving all the good connection untouched. Pressing ctrl+b at this point should only remove the short bad wire.

 

The entire wire should only be broken in cases where nothing is OK along its entire length, e.g. if there is no source or if it connects to two different data sources, for example.

 

Summary: Good parts of a wire should remain intact if only some of the branches are bad. Wires that go to a destination compatible with the wire source should not break.

 

(Similarly, for dangling wires, the red X should be on the broken branch, not on the good source wire as it is today)

 

Implementation of this idea would significantly help in isolating the location of the problem. Currently, one small mistake will potentially cover the entire diagram with broken wires going in all directions and finding the actual problem is much more difficult than it should be.

There are several great ideas on this Idea Exchange that were marked as Completed because they were implemented in NXG.

Although arguments could probably have previously been made that this wasn't really "complete" for most requestors, it was reasonable given the idea that NXG would replace LabVIEW 202x.

 

Given the updated fate of NXG, can these posts all be reevaluated and marked as either New or In Development, as appropriate?

If the evaluation is too effort-intensive, can they all be marked as New again?

LV2021 has a new "feature" called "Auto-Routing" (this is not Auto-Wiring, which can be deactivated in the options!). Auto-Routing moves wires around if you touch for example Sub-VIs.

Especially in compact VIs this function is a disaster right now. Sometimes for example wires will go "through" Sub-VIs so that an output leaves the Sub-VI at the wrong side resulting in a VI which is terrible to read:

1. Original Snippet of a VI:

Before.PNG

2. Same snippet, I just moved the "Get Variant Attribute Function" by one pixel to the right:

After.PNG

First we thought this is a bug, but the support told us it is a feature. But please: Let us deactivate this "function" in the options. I have colleagues telling me they would stop using LabVIEW if this remains as it is right now.

I'd like there to be an option to show some kind of indicator on string controls that you aren't seeing the entire string. This should also apply to string constants on the block diagram.

 

Hidden String.png

I searched for a similar idea, but couldn't find one. Let me know if there is already a similar idea.

Hi guys,

I'm missing some very fast way how to create cluster out of selection. It could be done as it is shown here:

 

create cluster.png

 

I think since LV developers became familiar with Every GUI Programmer's Dream they are ready for the next step...

Currently, it's a crapshoot when you drag an ant trail selection box around items on your FP or BD. It's truly an art to become good at selecting objects in LabVIEW - we all learn "hot spots" to place our selection rectangles, and we all heavily rely on the "Shift+Click" method of adding or removing objects from our selection. Below is an example of what actually might be selected when dragging a selection box:

 

SelectionBehaviorCrapshoot.png

 

All horizontal wires were selected down to "ABCDEF", even though just a very small portion of the visible wire was inside the selection box. It's not intuitive to try to not select wire that is hidden behind the Unbundle.

 

I propose a method that mimics selection in some graphics editing and CAD programs: the idea of "Enclosed" and "Inclusive" selections. An Enclosed selection is made by dragging the mouse from L to R. This operation selects only the objects THAT ARE COMPLETELY ENCLOSED by the selection box, ignoring objects that are partially outside the selection (the red arrow is not part of the BD, it merely represents the motion of the cursor):

 

SelectionBehaviorEnclosed.png

 

Alternatively, if you drag your mouse from RIGHT to LEFT for a selection box, you select every single object that is fully or even partially contained within the selection box:

 

SelectionBehaviorInclusive.png

 

Voila! Selection is now a TAUGHT SCIENCE instead of a LEARNED ART!

If you are not using the Data Event Terminals in an Event Structure, you might customarily hide them - roll them up so that only one terminal is showing. I would like to hide that remaining terminal. The idea is to not grey-out the Remove Element option when you are down to one terminal. That way, you can remove it. A stub remains to right-click on in order to bring the terminal(s) back if required.

 

24498iD9D667DE43F77BE8  

The "Probe Display" pane of most default probes should have indicators that are set to "Fit to Pane". The worst offenders, in my opinion, are Strings and Variants...I often find myself cursing the fact that I can't see more of the data, and usually have to copy & paste into Notepad++ or something to actually see what I'm looking for.

 

Yes, you can make custom probes for this behavior. But it should be native.

 

probe.png

When you develop with multiple LabVIEW versions, it is sometimes difficult to identify which version you're using or launching based on the icon of the LabVIEW EXE:

 

taskbar.png

 

Here's my Windows 7 taskbar with, among other things, LabVIEW 8.0, 8.5, 8.6, and 2009 icons.  Which one is which?  There are ways to tell, but it sure would be easiest if the version number were overlayed on the icon.  Note the Visual Studio 9.0 icon in the taskbar...I think we should do something very similar with the application icons of future LabVIEW releases.

 

NOTE: The icon should also reflect differences between the 32-bit version of LabVIEW and the 64-bit version of LabVIEW

I think structures should have a better label system. Currently I use free labels of the same color as the loop which looks great and makes the code easy to read and debug. But if I resize my loop I have to manually resize the label as well. I think this should be built into a right-click option.

 

(structure) rick-click » visible items » Structure label

 

Integrated Structure Labels.PNG

Automatic routing of new wires is actively trying to get in my way!

 

Automatic Wire Routing

I can add a manual bend and try to pixel align things myself then clean up mistakes after, but why can't it work right the first time!

I don't like the way that long file paths are shown in path controls and indicators:  If the path is longer than the textbox (and it usually is!), the user only sees the first several levels that fit.  This can be pretty confusing.

 

One way to solve this issue is to truncate the path in the middle in such a way that the filename or last folder (which is usually what's most important) is always shown.  I've seen this in other UIs and it should be a natural thing for users to understand.

 

Here's an illustration:

truncate_path_ctrl.png 

 

I think this should be a built in feature of the path controls and indicators, accessible through right-click menus and/or the properties menu of the control at edit time.

Currently, the block diagram has an endlessly useful feature. I use it every day - the Distribute Tool.

 

FrontPanelSpacingTool.png 

 

 

The following feature would be AWESOME for expediting BD readability:

 

BlockDiagramSpacingTool.png

Not so much an idea, as a wish/plead/rant:

 

Please make the next version of LabVIEW a major update of the features we have available to create user interfaces.

 

2011 was the "improved stability" version. 2014 should be the year it became simple and fun to create user interfaces that blow everyone's socks off. I'm not even talking about fancy stuff, just get the basics right!  Fix the graph indicators, and provide better front panel scaling options - and that alone will make 2014 the best update ever(!).

 

 

I started writing a list of all the things I find bad with the graph/charts for example, and found out that it would be better to just do a search here on the idea exchange to see how many ideas mention graphs alone. 2390 ideas! (yes, I have not gone through them all to filter out the ones that do not actually request changes to the graphs, but most of them do, directly or indirectly...). My own little list started like this, in random order:

 

Graphs and charts

1. You cannot stack plots in any of the graph indicators, only in charts
2. Number of plots stacked cannot be varied at run-time
3. Annotation properties are only partially available programmatically
4. Auto-scaling cannot be restricted to one way-only, it's behaviour cannot be configured in any way
5. Legends, palettes and tools do not fit together to form an organized user interface, nor are they possible to detach from eachother to get more flexible designs/scaling for ecxample...
6. XY graphs become sluggish and almost unusable with large data sets, where alternatives written in other languages have no performance issues
7. Plot colors could automatically adjust to the chosen background color - suggesting unique colors for the added plots that provide the best possible
visibility.

8. Graphs on e.g. Google and Yahoo have tonnes of cool features like animated zooming, thumbnail graphs, highlighting of the plot you hover the mouse over etc. which provide a very interactive feeling, you can achieve some of this in LV as well, but it could/should be possible with little or no programming

9. To get charts to accept data with variable sample rate (delta X) is possible, but cumbersome and an almost hidden feature...

 

Mixed signal
1. You cannot set the group names programmatically
2. The number of plot areas is not configurable at run-time
3. You cannot assign plots to a given group programmatically
4. You cannot show the visibility checkbox of each plot etc.

 

And then you have the additional 2000 ideas...;-)

 

As for front panel scaling there are not that many ideas (naturally), but the impact/value of them would change every LabVIEW programmer's life significantly. We can stop spending so much time finding ways around limitations in LV, and start focusing on the actual goal of our applications.

Would that not make everyone's day?

 

 

There's a common convention in LabVIEW where if a control is not a required input, you place the default value in parentheses:

 

WhatToDoTonight.png

 

 For the most part this make sense and is useful when calling VIs, but there is one place where it's really annoying:

 

 

No_Error.png

 

 

We know there's no error by default. I suggest that NI simply remove this. This can be done today by going to <vi.lib>\errclust.llb and modifying the control, but that's annoying to do with every installation.

 

I would even go so far as to say that NI should write a VI which will go through vi.lib and remove the text from all the existing VIs. I doubt this would have any backward compatibility issues, because I think the only place where those would be relevant is if someone is calling a VI in vi.lib dynamically AND setting the error in value, and frankly, those people deserve to be punished.