Random Ramblings on LabVIEW Design

Nothing too serious this time my lovelies as your brains are full of NIWeek stuff.

One of the things on my strange bucket list is to produce a range of corporate wear as a reaction to polo shirts with slogans such as "Delighting our customers with our passionate approach to LabVIEW solutions" or some such!....

This one has my favorite software related cartoon, I designed it as a prize for the European CLA summit 2013 (limited run of 3, ahhhhh Paris in the spring..)

This one I designed as a joke to be worn at a specific company in front of a specific manager. (limited run of 2)

For this one I doctored the original list of names for LabVIEW, Can only be worn by people called Fabiola....or maybe Fabian. (Limited run of 1)

Just promoting the new book, and everyone should look Spexy! (limited run of zero)

I have an extremely offensive one in my mind that involves QR codes, maybe for NIDays this year, but I'll probably chicken out, Got 2 others in the pipeline too, will post them when I've done them.

On previous blogs it was suggested that we must be doing something with action engines that others aren't and it got me thinking.....

All of our components (action engines) are designed with an understanding of coupling, cohesion and information hiding. A great deal of our book was dedicated to this subject, rather than just describing a technique. Now if you just use a technique with no comprehension of what makes a good component, state machine, class, actor etc etc I'm guessing you'll run into trouble. Another consideration is that where possible we base our components on real world objects and steer clear of abstract software constructs (for example we toyed with communication layer components for test systems and stepped away from them because they lacked clarity of design). From a coupling point of view we try to minimise communication paths and reduce dependencies, while still trying to get the block diagram to clearly represent the problem domain.

I'll keep on mulling this one over I think.

Reading Robert Glass book at the moment and in it is this quote (no-one credited for it).

Reality is the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of ugly facts

I think it is rather apt when applied to software design.

Lots of Love

Steve

Take it as read we use LabVIEW, but what other tools do we like.

Here's a list of tools we use...

TortoiseSVN

Wonderful Subversion version control client.

http://switch.dl.sourceforge.net/project/tortoisesvn/1.8.0/Application/TortoiseSVN-1.8.0.24401-x64-s...

Always use version control on your projects!!!! we like this because it's nice and easy. And it's free free free.

Codespaces

This is a paid cloud based project management and SVN repository and it is just awesome!!!

Links seamlessly with TortoiseSVN, just type in URL of repository, can set up a portal so that customers can report bugs and has nice easy project management tools.

Super fast Check Out and updates, incredible compression (25 active projects and only 210Mb used), back-ups every 5 minutes. Other cloud based repository's are available but this one has been a joy to use.

We pay $299 a year for 4 users and 2G of space.

http://www.codespaces.com/

Notepad++

I love this little text editor.

http://download.tuxfamily.org/notepadplus/6.4.2/npp.6.4.2.Installer.exe

LibreOffice

I have to say I've rather given up on Microsoft Office, I just find all the updates and licensing to be annoying.

I used Open Office for years but found that it didn't copy and paste Vector graphics into LabVIEW. LibreOffice spun out of OpenOffice and it does. Hooray!

http://mirrors.coreix.net/thedocumentfoundation/libreoffice/stable/4.0.4/win/x86/LibreOffice_4.0.4_W...

Draftsite

Sometimes we do proper engineering with drawings and everything. 2D CAD packages can be quite expensive or you could download a free/cheap one that had a ropey interface, crashes regularly and is incompatible with anything else. So imagine my surprise when I came across this little beauty.

All yours for $0 sacre bleu c'est incroyable!! (it's from Dessault)

http://dl-ak.solidworks.com/nonsecure/draftsight/V1R3.2/DraftSight64.exe

Klok

Right you cotton-headed-ninny-muggins do your time-sheet and no you can't put reading this as research!!!

But you could use this lovely little application to do it for you.

Click on a project to start it recording, or drag and drop to suit. Single user is free and very handy it is too.

You'll need Adobe Air (whatever that is) to run it.

http://www.getklok.com/downloads/Klok2.air

Databases

I like SQLite for small and portable and like MySQL for big and complex. The hidden gem in MySQL is the Workbench tool that ships with it.

Virtualisation

Run another Operating system in a window on your computer, it sounds like madness. Very handy for loading old versions of LabVIEW and debugging old versions of code. I don't find it so useful for initial designs when you're wrestling with everything not working.

http://dlc.sun.com.edgesuite.net/virtualbox/4.2.16/VirtualBox-4.2.16-86992-Win.exe

So what do you use and why?

Much Love and enjoy NIWeek if you are going, I'm very jealous.....

Steve Watts