Static background picture in LabVIEW

[LA]

We would like to place custom static graphics on a LabVIEW front panel. How can we do that? One situation is that the graphics should simply appear on the front panel. A more sophisticated use we are interested in is to put our graphics as a background of an indicator such as a radar plot. Is there a solution?

[kunhage]

Hi;
I have attached a sample VI I just made. I just copied the picture I wanted as my background to the clipboard. Use you favorite image application, like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. In this case I found this picture on the web, so I just right-cliked the pic on the browser and selected "Copy".

On the VI front panel, just paste (Ctrl-V) the picture in. To have the picture show through the gauge, I painted the face of the gauge transparent with the paint tool.

Hope this helps you.
/Kunhage

[LunaBlue]

To get a picure as an background of an frontpanel you just have to copy
it from a graphic application and paste it on your frontpanel.
But you should remind that the VI size become very big, even if you
paste a JPG file. It seems that labview convert it into an BMP.

Niko

[Greg_McKaskle2]

> To get a picure as an background of an frontpanel you just have to copy
> it from a graphic application and paste it on your frontpanel.
> But you should remind that the VI size become very big, even if you
> paste a JPG file. It seems that labview convert it into an BMP.
>

It depends a bit on the version, but LV typically saves them as a PNG.
As you said, you can copy and paste from another paint package, you can
also use Import in the edit menu, and you can drag-n-drop many file
types straight from the explorer.

If you would rather have the graphics as the background of a control or
indicator, your choices are to use transparency and place the static
graphic behind transparent controls, or put the graphics in the control
using the control
editor.

Greg McKaskle

[Labviewguru]

My experience was that it was easier to use a picture control the size of your front panel, and load the image. This way, you don't have to worry if you decide to change your picture. All you then have to do is replace the image file. I suggest using the most compact format available in picture controls, which is going to either be PNG, or JPG.

I believe that the problem I encountered that caused the use of the picture control was that the VI was way too big, and took too long to load. The picture control made it much more efficient.

With regards to placing pictures behind plots, you simply have to make the graph transparent as was already indicated.

[ian_fung]

hi, i have had this message from one of the engineer from NI Singapore sometime in July 2002 replying my quiry on why the imported picture (JPG) become so huge in file-size in LabVIEW front panel.

" Regarding the issue of pasting a graphic in LabView causes LabView to greatly increase in file size, LabView does not compress images unlike, programs like Paint, which specially does so, thus resulting in large file size.

I have checked with our corporate. We would suggest using a small, lowest color scheme pictures in either GIF, JPEG, or PNG formats. Copying a bitmap file from paint will very much increase the file size. BMP files seem to be the largest file format. Lowest color scheme means that you can save the picture in 24, 16, or 8 bit color, then do the lowest
one you can. You will then be saving that many bits per pixel in the picture in file size."

Hope this will help in one way or another.
Cheers