The development environment for RT is really a great, integrated system. It's so convenient to develp on a regular PC and deploy the VIs for testing. The real-time UI feedback during development is a boon to productivity. It's difficult to imagine a useful RT workflow that doesn't include a live panel in the development mode -- it's an idea that is both powerful and intuitive.
What I would really like to see next is similar RT panel interactivity in a deployed run-time system.
At the moment, I am using a 'remote panels' implementation to stream an interactive panel view back to the PC. (I assume that this is similar to how things are managed by the development environment itself.) The problem with this approach is that the Remote Panels API seems a bit flakey at times. I don't always seem to get a reliable connection. What's worse is the programming overhead associated with setting up the remote panels connection, and the sometimes fickle behavior of Windows in allowing a remote PC to connect.
Since the RT development environment already has the capability of seamlessly displaying an interactive UI on the Windows client, would it be that difficult to add UI panel feedback into the run-time executable environment?
I realize that, at first glance, this may seem to defeat the whole purpose of an RT system. However, I have built a few different Vision RT systems over the last few years, and the same challenge always seems to come up in every project. When I need to implement a calibration, focus and/or alignment mode on the RT target, I find myself performing all kinds of contortions to retrofit a simple interactive RT utility for use in the deployable application.
If I could simply implement an RT VI that presents an interactive UI on the Windows client (just like when you are in the LV Development mode), perhaps I could eliminate the complexity of my current strategies: Either 1) developing an elaborate case structure and messaging system on both sides of the network connection to pass images and parameters across the network in real-time, or 2) implementing a (hit-or-miss) remote panel linkage to a self-contained RT configuration VI over a remote panel connection that isn't always as robust as I wish it would be.
If the heavy liting has already been done for the Development system, surely it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to enable similar functionality in the run-time environment..?
Anyway, that's my wish for today.
