Most Imaginative / Craziest / Interesting Thing You've Done With LabVIEW

[Jason Stallard]

Using LV 6.1 and an RT-PXI, I wrote a controller for a hydrogen fuel cell. 

It was basically a big reactor to generate hydrogen from some long funky sounding chemical, and the hydrogen produced was then injected into an exhaust stream of a diesel engine....actually this was my very first LabView project ever!

[Ray.R]

Warren & Wes certainly have some interesting projects.

So are the games & the gambler!  😄

[Henrik_Volkers]

Some years ago ('02?) my sister was responsible for a certain part of a museum exposition called 'Mensch & Tier' (Men & Animal) and one thing she would have liked to show up was a research project about cow voice recognition.  More http://www.tb.fal.de/staff/jahns/animal.htm

The idea came up to make a 'game' for the visitors:   

I had a collection of cow 'Muuuhhs' from different cows. The 'user' could play some known cow calls with spectogram on the left side and some 'unknown' calls with spectogram on the right side. By comparing the spectograms and trusting their ears they have to find out which cow was calling.

I have to dig in my old backups to see if I find that again

Muuuuuuhhhh   

[tst]

Along the same lines, I wrote a game for my sister's daughter to help her learn reading. It would extract various images from a hierarchical file system (based on category) and would display a single file name from one of the images. The child has to choose the correct picture to go with the word. The game gets progressively harder (more pictures) as you go through the "levels". It also provided feedback through "good" and "bad" noises.

[shoneill]

I have written a thermal printer simulator for a pH-meter once!

Well kind of.  We were using an old Epson thermal printer (with a cute old spool of thermal paper) when it suddenly and unexpectedly (After around 20 years or flawless operation!) died.

Having no other way to extract the data from the pH-meter, I wrote a small LV probram to listen to the serial port and re-construct the graphics on the screen and save them on the hard-disk.  Some of the information was simple text, others were graphics in EPS format.

It seemed like a silly thing to be doing at the time, but it actually allowed us to archive the results much more effeciently than before.  It actually became something I was asked for from others, so it couldn't have been so silly after all.  Unless they all wanted to laugh at me.  😞

The final version was expanded to support multiple meters (different models - simultaneously!) and was in regular use when I left the company.

Shane.

[Ben]

Hi Shane,

Do you have that code?

I am planning on doing that same project  next month!

Ben

[johnsold]

I wrote a 6502 Assembler in LV3-LV4. We had some single board computers around which were based on the 6502 processor. We had retired our last Apple ][ and had no way to assemble code for the single board computer. The program parsed the source text file line by line. It identified "words" as labels, operands, variables, constants, or comments. It sorted out the addressing modes and ultimately generated binary in a format which our PROM programmer driver (also written in LV, of course) could read. The project was cancelled about the time I got the assembler 95% working.

My current spare time project is to write a GUI "wrapper" around a command line SPICE circuit analysis program on the Mac. The part which reads SPICE output files and plots the results is working. The next part will allow the user to select a SPICE list, choose the analysis to be done, append the analysis commands to the file, and call the SPICE program. Then the existing part will be used as a subVI for output display.

Lynn

[Ben]

Here is another one that I thought was cool.

The manfacturer of railroad locomotives  has a very extensive test plans that must be repeated and tracked in order to comply with all of the regulations of all of the contries where that equipment will be operated. The test plans (vary by customer and contry) required two engineers working together for three days to punch al of the buttons, verify, and log the results (if every worked perfectly!).

I replaced the opeartor interface (a rs-232 device) with a laptop running a LabVIEW aplication and was able to complete the test plan in 20 minutes.

Along the way we also discovered an issue with the interface that was never noticed by the human operators because the problem came and went faster than the eye could see!

So...

If you are riding a modern train, there is a good chance LV verified its operation.

Ben

[tst]

Well, we also grow fish using LV. We have a fishery control system spread over several miles which is controlled partly by Fieldpoints and partly by older controllers. The control system monitors various data in the ponds and decides accordingly what the proper operation is.

The office PC, of course, has a LV program as the interface and allows the operators to see everything graphically, including data analysis and animations. A miniaturized version of the interface is available through a PDA and a wireless connection so you can actually drive around the ponds and stay connected to the system all the time. The system also sends alerts and regular reports by SMS text messaging.

We've also used the PDA when testing other systems we built. By using a wi-fi connection, we can walk around the machinery and test all the electrical connections without having to shout and coordinate back with someone at the electrical board.

[shoneill]

Ok Ben,

I'm having trouble working out if you're being funny or not.

Either way, the code is at my last employer.  I suppose it MIGHT be possible to get to it, but since there was nothing really mindblowing about it (And it was programmed quite inefficiently I believe) I'm not sure how much good it will do you.

What exactly do you have to do? (Assumption : You're not pulling my leg).

Shane.