April 2018 | MediaMongrels

Malleables VIs: Practical Example Part 2 – Malleable Class Adaptation & Practical Application

April 18, 2018/0 Comments/in Blog /by Sam

This is the second of a two part post about the use of Malleable VIs in a practical project – rewriting a test system to use TestStand. In Part One, I introduced the project and the decision to use LabVIEW OO and Hardware Abstraction Layers to allow an easy switch between Simulated and Physical hardware in the test sequence.

In this part, I will discuss the implementation in more detail and how I am using the Class Adaptation feature of Malleable VIs. Class Adaptation allows me to create a malleable VI that can act on unrelated classes (i.e. no inheritance between them). I believe in Computer Science terms, this qualifies as some sort of Mixin.

Malleables VIs: Practical Example Part 1 – OO Hardware Interfaces for LabVIEW/TestStand

April 18, 2018/3 Comments/in Blog /by Sam

Introduction

In my first LabVIEW-related blog post, I introduced Malleable VIs, a new feature in LabVIEW 2017 allows the creation of generic VIs that can adapt to different data types on the connector pane.

In this two part post, I wanted to give a practical example from a current project I am working on to show some of the power of Malleable VIs. Part One (you are here!), will introduce the project and how I am using LabVIEW Classes (OO) to create Hardware Abstraction Layers (HALs) in LabVIEW for use with a TestStand test system. Part Two delves further into the implementation and show how I am using the Class Adaptation feature of Malleable VIs in the development of the test system.