On Monday, I was at the latest meeting of the Midlands LabVIEW User Group at the MTC in Coventry (across the road from the AMRC for the IIoT event a few months ago).

Lovely day to learn LabVIEW!

I was presenting on Malleable VIs but also up on the projector alongside me was Ian Billingsley from CCS presenting on their pragmatic approach to test rig design using LabVIEW/TestStand and Peter Horn from NI with ‘Code Reviews for Teams that don’t have time for Code Reviews’.

Ian Billingsley – CCS

First up was Ian – his presentation was very interesting as it is always good to see how others are customising TestStand. It looks like they have found a robust and adaptable architecture that allows continuous monitoring of the test rig along with controlling it from TestStand. There were also some interesting discussions about when/why you should use TestStand and the benefits of building a simulation interface into your software. If you didn’t make it to the MLUG meeting, he will be giving a revised version of the presentation at GDevCon in September.

Peter Horn – National Instruments

Second up was Peter talking about how Code Reviews are a Good Idea™ and that if you don’t currently do code reviews, you probably should. You don’t have to implement some huge process where you sit down for 3 hours and get grilled on every wire bend. I believe in the benefits of having someone else look at your code – both to improve software quality and as a learning exercise for the reviewee/reviewer. The key message of the presentation was that you have to find a process that works for you/your team (whether that’s formal/informal/tool-driven code reviews) and to nurture the appropriate culture for them within the team (it’s not to pick faults).

Me!

Finally, I gave my presentation on Malleable VIs – an introduction to Malleables and some practical examples of how I have used them in my code. I demonstrated some examples from my previous blog posts but also some fresh examples with the Type Specialisation Structure introduced in LabVIEW 2018. Whilst preparing the presentation, I discovered an obvious workaround to the property node limitation of Malleable VIs – just wrap the property node calls into a SubVI!

Here’s a sneak peak from the presentation of a Malleable VI that can set the enable/disable state of a scalar/array of controls – using a scalar/array of ‘Enabled/Disabled/Disabled and Greyed Out’ enums or booleans:

Set Enabled State.vim – Various supported use cases of the Malleable VI for enabling/disabling controls.

You find find the full slides from my presentation as a PDF here: Malleables in the Wild – MLUG 2018

In Summary

LabVIEW User Group meetings are a great way to network with and learn from fellow LabVIEW developers. Thanks to Argenta for organising another successful MLUG.

Just don’t ask us to take the CLAD exam any time soon! (We had some CLAD practice questions to work through as the coding challenge this time around – I’m blaming our poor performance on the lighting / projector!)