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

[altenbach]

Long ago, I had some connectivity problems with my cable modem.

Solution: I wrote a tiny UDP reflector (see image), that just sits there listening on UDP port 17000 forever. Whenever a packet arrives, it sends it immediately back to the originating IP. This runs on my office PC.

On the other end (at home), I have a labview program that sends UDP packets at regular intervals to the reflector, containing e.g. a timestamp in the payload, then listens for the return with a timeout. If a timeout occurs, the connection is bad, otherwise it calculates the roundtrip time, time/length of outages, packet loss%, plots it on a chart, makes a historgram, and does other statistics. Worked nicely!

Message Edited by altenbach on 01-24-2006 12:26 PM

[JeanPierre]

Once I was at work and needed a file that was in my computer at home. I knew that LabVIEW was running on it with the VI Server active (but allowing connections only from my work IP, rest reassured).  From LabVIEW at work, I opened an application reference to LabVIEW at home and a VI reference to VI.lib's "Read Character from File.vi" with the path to the file I needed and recovered it in a snap!
LabVIEW is powerful, secure your LabVIEW installations...!

Message Edité par Jean-Pierre Drolet le 01-25-2006 08:58 AM

Message Edité par Jean-Pierre Drolet le 01-25-2006 08:59 AM

[chilly_charly]

Nice comeback Jean-Pierre. Tu commençais à me manquer...

[BJD1613]

Oh no!!! Ben you didn't bring out the Alien!!!  Back in the Old Days!!! (that one is for you Ben) I wrote an app that tested the strength of children with Muscular Dystropy.  We used a variety of strain gages to measuere muscle strength and in the original design the Alien image that Ben posted was used.  It was pretty cool when you gripped the "Gripometer" you could squeeze the head of the alien.  It later evolved into programmatically choosing a vehicle (plane, car, jet, etc.) and having the image ride along a curve of a chart... Not the most efficient code but it got a good reaction from the kids!!  Too bad the medical types had problems with colors... (another one for you Ben).  Good times. 

I also agree that riding the trains was a fun time Ben.  I probably could go on and on....

I'm in a vi state of mind!!! ; )

[BJD1613]

Also on a trip down to NI I wrote pong and a simple slot machine... later I wrote spades and my favorite BJD blackjack, once you go bankrupt you need to remortgage your house... 🙂 

[Ray.R]

LOL!! 😄

That's a good one BJD..

(remorgage the house)  Actually, it happened to a neighbour for real.  Lost his house to a gambling problem.  and wife... and kids..  and job!!  ---> none of this related to LV, of course!!  😉

[Charcinders]

I once had to write a program to control a pump which fed measured amounts of pre-cooled peach flavoured iced tea into the mouth of a person in a MRI scanner.

(preferably without drowning them)

Chris

[chilly_charly]

My entry to the craziest thing contest : Tranfer data between two parallel loops using a video camera pointing to the screen and OCR as explained in this tread. 😄

The serious side of this work was that it tooks less than 2 hours to build this crazy vi, while finding out

1- an annoying "error/bug" in the IMAQ vis suite;

2- how OCR was working.

[The_Seeker]

What a great topic -- and so many interesting replies!

Here are a few LV 'oddballs' that I have done over the years:

- a software-based FM/AM (audio) synthesizer (no musical keyboard -- just exports sound files)

- a MIDI file parser (never quite finished it though...)

- a simulation of one of those "Magic 8-ball" toys from the '60s or '70s -- you know:  you ask it a question, shake it up, and get a prediction. (Programmed as part of a corporate presentation -- the entire presentation was actually a LV-based slideshow using a Tab Control...) 

- a contraction timer -- for my wife, when she was expecting our daughter. It was intended to give her a way to track and record contractions when she went into labor. (Of course, when the moment actually arrived, we were far too distracted to fire up the computer... 😉

- a math quiz/game to help my kids master basic arithmetic skills. (Also started on a musical symbols quiz, but haven't gotten too far yet...)

- A utility to extract and store contact and other information from html/perl forms (generated on a web site).

- A simple WYSIWYG web page builder (never quite finished that one either...)

There are a few others, but those are the oddest I can recall at the moment.

Anyway, keep 'em coming -- this is fun!

-- D.

[The_Seeker]

Here's another one:

A few years ago, one of my clients always communicated using .PDF files. The problem was, every PDF they sent attached to an email arrived corrupted. I still don't know the reason...

Anyway, I used LabVIEW to open the corrupted PDF files, and compare them with uncorrupted PDF files. Using this procedure, I discovered a problem with the header of the corrupted files. Next, I cobbled together a little LV utility to repair the corrupted files.

In the end, I was able to read the PDFs they were sending. It just required an extra 'decoding' step!  😉

-- D