Random Ramblings on LabVIEW Design

Or not

In the previous article I promised to work on an article using the on-board micro-controller on a LattePanda, I'll mark myself as a solid 5/10 as Adrian stole the LattePanda to do some RS485 testing and enclosure work..

So I bought the same micro-controller and did the driver just on that - the NEXT article will be the on-board one, I promise.

This article will document installing LabVIEW on OpenSUSE Linux on my tiny and cheap £25 PC off of Ebay. See the previous article for specs. The idea is to demonstrate how we can use Linux on small form factor (SFF) PCs as an embedded platform.

In my ongoing series of trying to stick LabVIEW onto small embedded platforms I had a LattePanda V1 land on my desk. So let's stick OpenSUSE on it an see if we can make it work.

More of my customers/jobs are wanting to use LabVIEW with Linux. As part of our Community Training Initiative we need to load LabVIEW and Drivers onto Linux, and it wasn't seamless. But the results were really impressive after a bit of work. So here we will go through various different distros and see what the install experience and performance is like on VM and on a tiny old computer.

It's time for me time.

The prototype course is nearly ready! Website coming, we have a logo, VM ready to download!, testing on-going.... it's all going on in the world of Community Training. So time for me to give some thanks.

Been a busy chap of late, but progress has been made.

I'll keep it as brief as possible.

That's how many impressions there have been on this blog, and that's a lot.

Prior to my excellent trip to GDevConNA I wrote an article about a LabVIEW Community Training Initiative...

Here's my progress report.

I described the LabVIEW eco-system in an article last year (Nov 2022), and in the last CSLUG meeting I explored where the gaps were. Some of the discussions from that has got me to thinking about having some form of community based training.

DSH Workshops is coming to the USA in a month!!

Here's our itinerary and lots of details and a few surprises.

I've been programming for around 40 years and my job has been at risk for around 40 of those years.... I now think I understand the tension in the system, and how it makes for poor management, processes and designs.

You don't have to work hard 100% of the time, in fact it's not good for the creative mind...

20 years ago we published "A Software Engineering Approach to LabVIEW", and I vowed not to write another book... well, never say never I guess

Let's have a look back at one SSDCs best years ever....

If you are familiar with my witterings you will be aware of the terms coupling and cohesion. Because my brain is attuned to thinking in this fashion I've noticed that they apply to other things too....

As promised this article will look at my thoughts for events (these are only my thoughts and not GDevCons, SSDCs, NIs), also they are not fixed ideas. I'm very much interested in what other people are interested in and stick any ideas in the comments.

In the last blog I talked about the importance of self-determination as one of the important reasons for starting organisations like GDevCon. I thought this article might be a good place to do a brain dump on the LabVIEW Eco-system.

Now is a good time to think about what we want for our community, here's my slightly strange take...

In the previous article I described why I want my software designs to help me with debugging. In this article I'll talk about the techniques we use to make our designs easy to debug during and after development.

As I've discussed before LabVIEW is great for debugging, why is debugging so important to me?

With a new variant of COVID running riot it may seem that things are as dark as this time last year, I see reasons to be optimistic.

I'm thinking of starting a series of articles on interesting projects using LabVIEW that demonstrate its capabilities. DM me if you want to submit something (you'll be interviewed and an article written if it fulfils one of the criteria described below).

Articles will be need to be approved by the interviewee in writing before they are published.

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.