Display issues with all plot and graph types

[gstanczak]

Hi,

I have general display issues with every kind of chart, or graph, or plot that I try to use, on two different machines, both with NVIDIA graphics cards.  One machine is a MacBook running XP SP2 in bootcamp, and the other a Dell T3400 Workstation (or something similar) running XP SP3.

I posted this thread a while back which Ben responded to regarding weird chart behavior.  Ben suggested that I try to simplify my code as much as possible while retaining the bad behavior, and submitting to NI and the forum, because there others have had chart issues.  I tried, but to no avail.  The display issue persists and persists and persists and then they just goes away and I can't get it back by undoing the last code reduction or simplification step.  But at some point while rebuilding the code, which I can't determine, the bad behavior returns.

So, I have been putting up with crappy looking charts, until recently, when I thought I would try some suggestions from other posts to make an XY-plot function like a chart by creating a data buffer and using plot property nodes for controlling the range.  Things were looking promising, until my "XY-chart" started getting crappy, too.  This time, the issue was with the grid lines becoming all chopped up, images attached.

I am at wits end here.  I feel that I have run out of options for displaying graphical data in an acceptable manner.  Do I have to display data using an Excel chart within an ActiveX container in Labview?  I am not skilled enough to even do that.  I love Labview, its the only programming language that I am even remotely proficient using, but this is just inferiorating.

Any suggestions would be very appreciated.  Thanks for reading.

-Greg

[gstanczak]

I have checked that it's not a "fill to" option. It does sort of looks that way.

[Thør]

Hmm, so this happens with all kinds of charts/graphs, but intermittently?  This is a strange one...  What kind of thing are you doing in your code to make this crop up?  Is it anything really crazy, or just the typical displaying things on a graph?  Are you using some strange configuration of property nodes, for example?  If you could post up some code that shows this behavior, that would help a bunch.

[gstanczak]

Thanks for the reply.  I wouldn't describe it exactly as intermittent.  Once the problem crops up, at some point in the code development that I can't pin-point, it becomes very consistent.  That part is similar to the issue I had with the chart that I describe in a previous post about a year ago.  Once the problem started, it was consistent.  And, I am not doing anything special.  For the particular XY-plot image that I attached in my previous post, I have a 100 sample 1d numeric array and a 100 sample 1d timestamp array where I rotate the array -1 indices, delete the first element, then append the newly acquired single sample and timestamp to their respective arrays to act as buffers.  I bundle these two arrays (numeric and timestamp) and send it to the XY-plot.  The XY-plot has auto x-axis scaling enabled, and no properties nodes are written to.

I first initialize the 100 sample array buffers with NaN, , and replace indices with real data about 1 sample/sec.  I had an idea that it may be an issue that for the first 100 seconds, the XY-plot is continuously "squishing" the data because the x-axis is set to auto-scale, and NaNs are ignored.  After the 100th NaN is replaced, the plot then scrolls like a true chart does.  I am curious to see if I can stop the "squishing" of the data by setting the range with property nodes (which I have been trying to stay away from for now), to get it to scroll like a chart even when half the array is NaN.  I hope that makes sense.

I am going to try extra hard to post a simplified version that exhibits the problem.  Thanks so much for listening.

Regards,

Greg

[gstanczak]

Kyle,

I have something.  I was able to create a real simple program that demonstrates the problem.  The upper plot with display issues was copied and pasted from the program that I was having trouble in.  The plot on the bottom was inserted right from the controls palette (i.e., its a brand new chart.)

Can you confirm on your machine that the upper chart has a problem and lower plot does not?  I have also attached a screen grab of what I get.  I tried to modify the new plot to be identical to the old one.  I could not get the plot with the issue x-scale format to be automatic formatting.  For me, it would always revert to absolute time.

Any ideas?  I am very excited here because I feel like I'm a little bit further along to getting my displays fixed.

Thanks!

Greg

v7.1.1

[Thør]

I'm definitely seeing the glitches when running that VI on my machine (LV 2010 SP1).  You're saying that if you were to run that VI long enough on your machine, the bottom graph would start looking like the top one?

[Cerati · Accepted solution]

Greg,

is there any particular reason why you are using the Bar Plots -display style on upper chart ? Try activating the Plot legend, go to Bar Plots and select the first Bar Plot Style. Your chart is displayed just fine after that.

Cheers,

Cerati

[gstanczak]

Cerati,

First of all, I'm a little embarrassed that I never knew about right clicking the plot legend to change plot properties.  I always spent a lot time making user interfaces to do that.  So, that's extremely helpful.

Secondly, no, there is no particular reason that it is set to bar plot.  And your suggestion did fix the problem.  I did not intentionally change that, and I don't know where in my code that could have happened.  If I did write that to a property node at one time during development, how did it get to be a white bar plot with a blue line?  I can't seem to get that appearance by using the plot properties accessible from the plot legend.  That's not to say you can't, I just can't.

Thanks so much!

Greg