Random Ramblings on LabVIEW Design

I've been using my open document toolkit with a number of years now and it's been very handy. Well now it is even handier!

I don't have a lot of spare time or energy currently to push out material into the community.

One low effort way I could do something is a Zoom Ask Me Anything Session...

Would anyone be interested in that?

This seems to affect a lot of programmers and if you knew my history you may think I should really suffer from it, but I don't. Is it irredeemable arrogance and can it be taught?

A general talk about happiness and why it's important for creatives....

During a very enjoyable flurry of DSH Workshops last week a theme began to appear, in this article I'll talk about it and why I think it is important.

The main purpose of Software Design is to break a large problem into smaller more manageable problems. Up until now we've concentrated on actual Computer Science based design techniques and metrics like Coupling, Cohesion and various other principles. We also apply heuristics like globals=bad or a block diagram should be a single page.....

I think there is a concept specific to graphical programming and it's to do with block diagram time.

Last week I had a couple of conversations about LabVIEW that made me sad. To protect the peeps conversing I'll not go into too much detail of their situations.......

Because my preview of for 2020 was such a resounding failure, I thought I would have a bash at previewing 2021!

A look back on 2020 for SSDC, GDevCon, CSLUG and DSH Workshops.

Here's how to take Dr James Powells wonderful SQLite toolkit and do encrypted stuff with it.....

I'm guilty of doing this too, so apologies up-front...

The computer science terms are cohesion and Single Responsibility Principle, but there's something missing in the definitions. I'll explain....

Had nearly 60 attendees for this session with some excellent comments and some lovely feedback, it's really appreciated.

This article will be the place to pickup some examples, with explanations. There will also be a link to the video of the session for those that could not attend.

I'll also muse what to do next, if anything.

I think databases are an essential skill for a software designer. Similar to my LabVIEW UI playtime, who fancies attending a LabVIEW dB playtime?

I'm doing it 18:00 Tues Aug 11th (BST). More details in main text.

I'm going to start a series of articles prefixed a A Good Design and use it as a mechanism to illustrate various design concepts.

To start the ball rolling let's look at a self explanatory design.

We had a nice little group for the session, with some excellent questions.

This article will be the place to pickup some examples, with explanations. There will also be a link to the video of the session for those that could not attend.

I've not done a get together for a while, so why not join me on July 15th (13:00-14:00 BST) for a mess about with User Interface stuff.

I'll keep the agenda to myself for now.....

They've gone and changed the wallpaper around here, but I think there is more to it than that. Here's what I think.

VIWeek is done, and the thing we made turned out good. I'll open up about my motivation and how I felt about the event.

NOTE: We are planning a pukka post-mortem of the event with all the volunteers, this is not this!

As the postponed NIWeek fast approaches my DSH friends thought it would be nice to mark the occasion by putting on some virtual meetings and this idea blossomed somewhat. This here will be the rough agenda for #VIWeek, come join us..

And keep checking back, the agenda will hopefully get filled up over this week.

If enough people are interested I can do a webex session on my ODF tools and ODF file structures. I've found these incredibly useful with the capability to generate reports and spreadsheets from RT as well as auto-generation of internal documents and customer reports.

We've had some nice feedback on our general template design, including our way of doing state-machines. Which is an unexpected pleasure in these ugly times. The best thing about the feedback is that the feedbackers explain why the design worked in language not our own. And that gets my brain going....

Something a little different for this article, we have a guest writer!. My colleague at DSH Workshops Joerg Hampel discussing how he took my State Machine stuff and made a lovely PlantUML visualisation tool for it (also made it using user events rather than queues). It's pretty damned cool..

There is a lot more talk about design reviews, code reviews and project postmortems and that is brilliant. Some of what I hear is slightly inaccurate and this article seeks to clarify..

Sometimes it's easier to dump design decisions on your users than to try and write code to satisfy complex and conflicting requirements

Here's some techniques we use.... and a little gift

Over the years we have made a lot of systems, I thought I'd share some of the useful circuits we've delivered as part of them.

This first one was used as a battery back-up for a monitoring system monitoring Azipods on ships..... read on to find out what an Azipod is.

Company Announcement: SSDC has become an NI Center of Excellence!

What does that mean then?

Here's how we use databases at SSDC (if we're left to our own devices). Talking SQLite and MySQL here.

05-Feb-2020 Added MySQL TCP Driver LabVIEW 2015 - Example.vi shows example connecting to an open dB

On 1st January 2000 I joined SSDC, here's what's happened in the last 20 years....

Let's see what we have in store for 2020 shall we...