LabWindows/CVI User Group Blog

I’m a professional problem solver, and I love it!  So when I ask, “How can I help you out? “, I’m looking for a challenge. The best part of being an Applications Engineer with National Instruments is that I get to touch so many projects. There are so many people using CVI in so many different fields, from military/aero, oil/gas, to medical, I rarely hear the same issue twice. So I’m always on my toes and ready for the next call.

Even though I never know what to expect when I pick up the phone, NI does a great job of making sure I can set my customers up for success. Everyone knows that ANSI C is rock solid and code written in this language can be recompiled and reused for years to come, but not everyone knows about NI’s commitment to innovation and new technology support, both with hardware and software. CVI is dedicated to longevity and backward compatibility so that you can successfully move forward as your test system requirements change. With National Instruments at the front of breaking technology and innovation, you can be assured that if you need to replace a test station, or double your production lines, you will be successful with CVI and complementing data acquisition hardware.

I'm also lucky that our CVI forums and CVI community are both full of customers bent on making my job easier. When I'm not taking phone calls or working on NIWeek demos, i browse the forums help answer customer questions. Since we have such huge fans of CVI, I rarely have to lift a finger, and I'm always amazed at the quality of comments. So a big kudos goes out to all of you CVI forum posters out there!

Enough about me and my job, the real reason you’re all here is to hear about CVI. If you haven’t already demoed the new CVI Execution Profiler Toolkit, I highly recommend it. The Execution Profiler Toolkit is the easiest way to pinpoint the function calls that are taking up too much time, so your applications can run more efficiently.

I was working with a customer who was seeing a non-linear increase in the amount of time it took to process a data set. So running a report on one file took 2 seconds, three files took 8 seconds, 4 files took 16 seconds, and so on. So you can really see how optimizing the program would save a lot of time in the long run, especially when they regularly processed 50 to 100 files. We couldn't figure out exactly which part of the program was causing this slow down until we used the Execution Profiler Toolkit. As soon as the toolkit was installed and setup, we quickly saw that the problem was coming from a sorting function that was re-arranging the data before it got analyzed. We implemented a more efficient search algorithm and execution times were cut in half. No guessing and checking required because we had all the performance and function execution data we needed to better optimize the source code. In addition to the Execution Profiler Toolkit; I’m also really excited for the new attribute browser, both of which were suggested by customers like you!

So, if you’ve got a question about CVI, go ahead and let us know at ni.com/support