Distributed Control and Automation Framework (DCAF) Developers Guide

[johnboydni]

Today we are releasing the first edition of the Distributed Control and Automation Framework (DCAF) Developers Guide, attached to this forum post. Whether you are a first-time or veteran user of DCAF, the guide will be a helpful resource for writing embedded applications using the framework.

The guide covers the following DCAF topics:

1. Overview of the major components and how they fit together.
2. Guidance on software design best practices for embedded applications, including guidance on when to build new plugin modules.
3. Creation of a new application with the framework and execution templates.
4. Creation of new modules from project templates and extensions for your application.
5. Distribution and collaboration guidelines for contributors.

We strongly encourage you to refer to this guide when creating your embedded control applications. If you have feedback, suggestions, or comments please reply to this post. We also welcome feedback in the form of issues in the LabVIEW-DCAF/Documentation repository on github, found here: https://github.com/LabVIEW-DCAF/Documentation

Happy Coding!

[wireman]

There is excellent documentation on the DCAF here, but, in my humble opinion, it takes far too much browsing to find tutorial (NI calls it Hands On) information to really get started. Perhaps part of my difficulty is that I searched for DCAF Tutorial, but it's called Hands On.

For instance, this page might be the launching point that many start from, but the tutorial is not listed here.

http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/213988

The tutorial / Hands On, as I've finally stumbled into by accident, is found at:

https://github.com/LabVIEW-DCAF/Documentation/blob/master/Trunk/Getting%20Started%20Material/Hands%2...

The Getting Started page does make mention of the Hands On, but the link is broken on this page:

http://www.ni.com/tutorial/54342/en/

[BeCeGa]

Hi Wireman, yes the link is broken and we just moved the Hands on to this new location and we just updated the format by splitting it into smaller hands on. Thanks for your feedback, and we are working on making things easier to find. 

[a_clucker]

Hey wireman,

I've just updated the link in the Getting Started page (https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA03q000000YGZyCAO&l=en-US), and we're looking into the Tools Network Page.

Thank you for providing us with this specific feedback!