Category: Blogs

There is something common for most of the virtual machine managers. That is the ability to go back to earlier state like time-machine, which is supported by almost all of the virtual machine manager like VMware, VirtulaBox, HyperX etc. In VirtualBox this ability is called as snapshots. (more…)

In my last blog post, I said about a few key benefits of developing LabVIEW in Virtual Machines (VMs) like VirtualBox. Here is some details about first key benefit I realized. VMs provides a workflow for developers to separate the various projects in individual environments which eventually reduce the deployment issues.Some of the deployment issues which are faced while delivering LabVIEW application to a customer areMissing or unsupported software tools in the customer(deployment) PCIncompatible or mismatching software installed in deployment PCScenario Example: As depicted in above figure, let's consider that we have three project X,Y,Z which goes to three different customers and consider that each customer has different licenses from NI. Hence their LabVIEW version (2017,2016,2014) gets differed for each different project. All three different relies on a specific version…

Virtual machines (VMs) are applications which can mimic your real PC and enable you to run individual virtual PC under another operating system (Windows/Mac/Linux) .It's popular for various reasons among users, and each user would say their own merit/demerit experience with VMs.Various VM applications are out there in market. Some of popular ones areVirtualBox from Oracle (Opensource)Workstation Player from VMware (Free basic version and paid premium version)Hyper-V from Microsoft (I used it for free in Windows 8)Parallels (for Mac machines)A Mac cum LabVIEW users would be quite familiar with Virtual Machines and Parallels because they had to run LabVIEW in Windows environment and Parallels is the one which offered that flexibility. However a windows user may not need to start using LabVIEW with VM as most of the LabVIEW offering…

Sometimes we just want to review or edit the FPGA VIs in LabVIEW project, but there will be huge stopping point of installing whole FPGA in the PC which might takes ages to install and also consumes too much of the disk spaces. FPGA compilers would take as much as 20+ GB. This would essentially include FPGA Farm compiler, ISE and Vivado compilers.One way to escape so much of installation time and saving the disk space is to carefully un-check the FPGA compiler during installation process. The general practice we follow for the team is that, we only install FPGA module in individual development PCs of team members and dedicate a separate PC which does the compilation process. In the dedicated compiler PC we would need to install all FPGA…

Today is Mother's day. Mom is always a special space with love in whatever place you're at. On this special day, I would like to recall 3 key lessons she's given me.#1 : Tolerance & PatienceQuote in Tamil : "பொறுத்தார் பூமி ஆள்வார்"Pronounced as "Poruthaar boomi aalvaarr"Meaning: Those who is patient and tolerant rules the worldAt times I wonder how my mom is able to tolerate the harsh & wounding words from others. When the same words thrown at me, I become easily intolerable and burst out in reflex. The patience and tolerance seems to be seeping in me after I become dad which tells silently "this harsh moment will also pass by and there is more admirable moments around this little harsh moments". Lately I found how much I can…

Most of us are used to right hand mouse control and few are by nature left hand-ers and they use mouse in their left hand. Have you ever tried swapping your mouse to the other hand and draw the LabVIEW wire? Then try giving it a chance now, I tell you that you will feel a great difference. Don't just try it for few minutes, but take it as challenge for an hour or day even after your brain says "Oh God..! It's hard, go to your default hand." By default, I'm a right hand user and in our work, colleagues had a fun of using other hands. Initially it was very hard to even draw a single wire from one VI to other VI but what I discovered trying…

There would be some hard times as a LabVIEW developer when you're able to find libraries available for windows but not for your NI Linux targets. Some times it would be relaxation when we want that library for our NI-Pharlap based target, because to some level you can call the windows based DLL/Library APIs in NI-Pharlap. However, when it comes to Linux based NI target, it's quite frustrating that we can't find right libraries because as LabVIEW developer we always biased with Microsoft Windows mindset. Recently I came to such regrets then a 'yay' moment after bumping in some rough surfaces. For one of the LabVIEW application with ByteLabs, we found a library available in windows but we wanted the same library for our NI-Linux based RT target. Our team…

A typical application in LabVIEW development flows through the stages likeApplication Start-up StageApplication Running StageApplication Exit StageOver the years this became evident to many developers and hence they all unanimously agreed upon design patterns like state machine. A state machine template (like JKI simple state machine) usually have these three stages of an application (as initialize state, your process states, errors state, exit state so on) and enable the developer to easily bring up the application to end customer without worrying about how exit process works. These templates are so helpful if your application runs on single while-loop or to-the-max if your application is within one target.However, if the application extends between more than one targets (like inter-process application) then we realize that we're crossing the limits of these templates'…

You can emulate an NI-Desktop Real Time(RT) System in a virtual machine using VirtualBox from Oracle. This helps in great ways...You don't need a separate PC to check your logic in real NI-RT without even an extra physical PC in your side. Testing in customer site would not require additional logistic of other PC.You don't need cRIO or PXI to start learning/coding your RT applicationCheck my virtual machine running NI-RT below with 1-core processor, 512MB RAM and 2GB HDD which I created within 2 hours from scratch.I want to credit and thank the user "D4N!3L3" in NI forum who was the one successfully did this virtualization of NI-RT and put it up in this idea exchange. The instructions given by him/her is very crisp and short where I lost searching…

In my last post I gave a simple method used to simulate the unavailable hardware (be it cRIO, bench-top instruments, PXI or any kind) which can communicate to LabVIEW application. I also mentioned that I simulate using data sockets which I will explain in this article. Data socket is a pretty much like a global variable. According to NI...DataSocket is an easy-to-use, high-performance programming tool that is designed specifically for sharing and publishing live data in measurement and automation applications between different applications and between machines across the Internet. DataSocket for LabVIEW simplifies live data exchange between different applications on one computer or between computers connected through a network.Simulation using data socket is more similar to earlier explained simulation using boolean as input to instrument driver VI. On top of…