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

[Brian_Beal]

OK, here is my entry.  Other, more successful, contestants in the DARPA Grand Challenge used Labview, but this is my effort.  See www.bjbeng.com for more details.

[tbob]

Finally, my turn.  Anybody ever hear of an iButton?  This handy device is the size of a watch battery and comes in several flavors, one being an NVRAM.  You communicate with the device with a USB adapter.  A network can be built by daisy chaining devices.  The network consists of a signal wire and ground.  Since ground is common throughout a rack and stack test set, only 1 wire is needed for communication, hence the name 1-wire network.  Made by Dallas Semiconductor. 

Anyway, my project uses Labview to call many DLL functions to operate an entire file system on the NVRAM iButton.  I can create files, directories; read, write to them; set attributes; all the stuff you do with a file system on a hard drive.  I am using this system to store model and serial numbers of test instruments in the rack.  With newer test instruments, you can send a GPIB query (*IDN) to get the serial number, but with older equipment, especially VXI stuff, you cannot.  Now the iButton holds the info in text files. 

My software creates the text files, the user types in model/serial numbers, and such.  Software also does maintenance such as delete or rename of re-write files.  But the main thing is that I created software to read all instruments model and serial numbers that reside on the test set.  This hardware configuration is stored in a data base with a timestamp.  This allows the tracking of test equipment, and retreiving info about which equipment was used to test a certain product on a certain date and time.  Comes in handy when there is trouble, and also to track down test equipment that seems to give trouble wherever it goes.  The project isn't finished yet, but the iButton hardware design has been tested and works like a charm.  Next comes the tracking software and such.  I learned a lot about calling DLL functions and passing clusters, arrays and such between LV and DLLs.

[mallicos]

How about replacing all the wires with TCPIP links, every vi with a different IP address, that is pretty different! We are doing this quite successfully (even wireless links) , and it is the future for distributed instrumentation(I believe).

Thanks,
Sam @ Coherent

[Conseils]

I can't recall if someone did something similar before. If you did then you inspired me...

Well last summer, I wanted to know how much money I was saving using my water solar panel (a very large rubber mat with thin tubes running through it) to heat the outdoor swimming pool and teach my son a bit about physics and measurement. So I had my nine year old help measure the flow of water with buckets and a stop watch for the circulation pump, he got very wet. But that was part of the object of the exercise . Then with thermocouples (solar panel inlet and outlet, one in the pool, one in the ground and air temperature) and LabVIEW, we calculated how many kilowatts of energy the sun was pumping into the water in real time and produced a graph for each 24 hour period.

The software was done (with help) on the fly by my son, the picture contains a small graphic of the solar panel.

We obtained about 20 kW hours of energy per day in the summer, the pool got to about 29°C on the best day (that's about 84°F). Cool or what.


For safety the PC RS232 was optically coupled to the thermocouples to provide isolation, remember; water and electricity don't mix. Even a PP3 (6LR61 MN1604) 9v battery can kill in the wrong circumstances!

[Albert.Geven]

My nicest program was a bingo version for a youth chess club. We used chess pieces instead of numbers and used a labview program to print out bingo like pictures in a square, randomized of course.
a picture ring in an array of pictures was the drawing.

the most difficult part were the pictures, untill I stole them from a chess game.

[Tareq]

Using IMAQ and DIO DAQ I made a LabVIEW program that solves a 6x6 maze and moves the object from the start position to the end.

the user configures the maze as he whants and put it on a plate that is attached to 4 steppers to move the plate in 4 directions. LabVIEW analyzes the maze and find a way starting from the object cell you wish to move. then it starts moving the object from its position to the end.

[PiMaster]

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@DAQ Dude wrote:

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

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I've been wanting to do this for a while.  Looking through all the waveform generation functions, it seems so obvious and tempting.

[PiMaster]

Actually, what I'd really like to do, if I had some AIO functionality on my home PC, is to model some guitar stomboxes in LabVIEW.  Try and make my own effects and stuff.

[desktoplabs]

A tug of war for the Queens Science Museum, two remote locations, a rope at each place
Fish on a Stick, Aquadynamics, for the Boston Museum of Science, various rubber fish body shapes on sticks and how they mov through water
Galileo Drop, for the Boston Museum of Science, Two tall columns with elevators with doors of the bottom. Place various objects in the buckets
take them to the top and they drop. LabVIEW charts the acceleration one the way down
Build a Solar Car, for the Boston Museum of Science, Build cars, race them, then go to LabVIEW to record results, vote, learn
In Ear device, Sonomax, attenuate loud sounds but let conversation through, not in production
3D Motion Analysis for person walking, 5 rods in a person's vertebrae (really) pointing out, LabVIEW and a 3D acquisition device (Flock of Birds)
tracked the vertebra as the person walked on a treadmill
LandMine detection, for US Navy, sweeping an area with a long wand and detector, but in order to to skip a quadrant LabVIEW tracked the sweep
Test military equipment, for AeroNavLab, a half of a 3/4 ton pickup truck was mounted with shakers. Equipment for Iraq was thrown in the back
and vibrated for a day to simulate being driven across the desert, sic. Mil Spec. LabVIEW operated the test.
Portable Optical Text reader, for HP, while prototyping this 7x3x3 device used 3D tracking to train users to keep it close to perpendicular to
the page
Created special clock for large permenant Manhattan Public Sculpture, Clock has 16 4' tall numerals, time is 24 hour time going from left to center
then from right to center tells time LEFT in the day, potentioally more interesting since it's opportunity (http://www.desktoplabs.com)

LabVIEW's fun and enabling. Hard to imagine what can't be imagined and created with LabVIEW.

[norlux1]

I read with great interest many discussions on how to interface 1-wire devices from Dallas Maxim to LabVIEW.  I am in the midst of trying to creat LabVIEW routines for 1) identifying 1-wire devices onan assembly, 2) assigined devices to particular channels, and 3) storing gathered information in a 1-wire EEPROM.  I am just starting the process, but would appreciate any example vi's you may have, particularly the one you referenced below.