Graphics - how to display fluid flow in a pipe

[MarkDavidGeorgePotter]

Hi, everyone;

I have been asked to make a bit of labview software to simulate the operation of a turbine based system. this needs to look good for a public display. I need to show the flow of various quantities (fuel, water, electricity) between components of the system.

Currently I am using fill slider controls to make a series of moving "blocks" to represent this flow along the pipes/wires. this looks OK, but for some reason causes the program to run very slowly when there are more than a couple of flows haappening (I need 10 fill slider bars each with 6 fill sliders all constantly moving to create a decent visualisation).

It is probably running slowly because that is not what the fill slider controls were designed for, but does anyone know a better way? the program needs to go onto a tablet for demonstration and this runs much slower than my development laptop, enough to make it not look so good.

Is there a more efficient way to display this within labview? Can i import an animated GIF or such and control its running within labview, or is there a better type of control or indicator that will run faster? Any advice appreciated!

Mark.

[OllyT]

Any chance you can post your code and maybe we can work out why it is running so slowly?

Olly

[MarcoMauri]

Did you try using the Defer Panel Update property?

Give a try to the following:

1) Set the property to True

2) Update all the sliders

3) Set the propery to False

Regards,

Marco

[apok]

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@MarcoMauri wrote:

Did you try using the Defer Panel Update property?

Give a try to the following:

1) Set the property to True

2) Update all the sliders

3) Set the propery to False

Regards,

Marco

---

i had the same problem with LED indicators to simulate cockpit aircraft lighting......"defer panel update" was the solution for my application

[iengineer]

Buddy you should probably try the attached .ctl and .vi to gain some idea. Hope this helps. Requires few modifications about array manipulation.

This control is from data logging and supervisory control module and I have placed it in an array and stretched it to display it as a long pipe. 

[Michael_78]

I use picture rings and hide the border. It is more effort to draw pictures in a graphics package to animate, but the results are impressive, smooth and very low cpu. Ill try and find an example to post when I get to my pc.
Michael

[tst]

Bad performance is often caused by code with no waits which takes over the CPU or by overlapping elements in the UI, which LV has more issues with drawing. I wouldn't expect simple sliders to cause issues. As said, posting the actual code would probably help in locating the issue.

You can also search for example that people posted of flow animations. You can find one such example here, where it's a cluster with an image inside, which is moved back and forth to generate a Star Trek-like animation. As far as I remember, there were no performance issues with that, although it does require more work.