#dealing with complexity

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Dealing With Complexity

As the producer and correspondent of a television or radio news magazine (like 60 Minutes, VICE News, or All Things Considered), you have been assigned to deliver an informative 12-minute segment on one of the contemporary issues you and your classmates have been discussing during the past three weeks. Corporate policy requires that you consider insights from two or more academic disciplines for…

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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn LabVIEW

A Tree Grows in LabVIEW

This time out, I want to start exploring a user interface device that in my opinion is dramatically under-utilized. I am talking about the so-called tree control. This structure solves a number of interface challenges that might otherwise be intractable. For example, the preferred approach to displaying large amounts of data is to avoid generating large tabular blocks of data, opting instead to…

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Expanding Data Processing Bandwidth — Automatically

Expanding Data Processing Bandwidth — Automatically

Well-written software can typically deal with any performance requirement pretty easily as long as the requirement is constant. It’s when requirements change over time that things can get dicey. For example, if your test system generates a new data packet to process every second and it consistently takes 5 seconds for the data to be processed, a little simple math will tell you how much…

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Finishing the Configuration Management

Finishing the Configuration Management

For the last couple posts we have been looking at how to best utilize object-oriented programming methodologies. In that quest, we have taken as our example the goal of converting the parts of our testbed application that use stored configuration data to a configuration manager based on object classes. In this implementation, the classes represent the various types of potential data repositories.

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Objectifying LabVIEW

I suppose a good place to start this post is with an admission that, in a sense, it is flying a false flag. One way that you could reasonably interpret the title is that in this post I am going to be showing you how to start using objects in LabVIEW. That interpretation is not correct, and the troublesome word is “start”. The fact of the matter is that you can’t use LabVIEW without interacting…

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Raising the Bar on Dynamic Linking

Important:Before we get started this week, if any of you have downloaded the code from last week and have had problems with it, please update you working copy with what is currently in SVN. In working on this post, I found some “issues” — including the significant problem that the database that defines everything didn’t get included in the repository release. The current contents of the…

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A "Finished" Testbed Application

A “Finished” Testbed Application

As I’ve worked on the past several posts, I had a very specific milestone in mind. You see, I am wanting to use this LabVIEW blog to demonstrate and explain a lot of things that I have learned over the years, but the proper presentation of those topics typically requires a certain amount of pre-existing infrastructure.

That is what I have been doing through the preceding posts — building the…

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The Opposite of Simple

The Opposite of Simple

It may not have occurred to you, but every application exhibits two forms of complexity. This dual nature of complexity can, at times, make it hard to keep straight what someone means when they start talking about “simplifying” an application.

First there is the complexity that is inherent in what you are trying to do. In that definition, notice that the word “inherent” is the important one. It…

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