Leah's LabVIEW Blog

I realised the other day that's it's been more than a year since I used LabVIEW! After a couple of job changes, I've ended up using other languages but I do still have a huge soft spot for LabVIEW and graphical code. That being said, I hadn't realised how different the text-based ecosystem felt in terms of tools and workflows. Here's some of the things that have blown my mind: Text diffs in MRs on GitLab where you can add comment threads to line ranges. I guess you can still add comments to LabVIEW MRs on a file-by-file basis but there's nothing like being able to point to an exact line! (Or subVI, I guess!). Even being able to see the code in GitLab instead of having to pull it down to check what it is is super nifty. Being able to `Git blame` in the browser in GitLab, or within Git itself. This basically shows a log of who changed a line and what they changed it to. In LabVIEW there's not a simple way of seeing who messed with your code without pulling up ...

Greetings LabVIEW friends, Yesterday I decided to have another go at LabVIEW on Linux, to see if I could help make Antidoc compatible with Linux machines. I decided to use Ubuntu because it's compatible with LabVIEW and still fairly popular. I started off with several failed attempts: I dug around for my old Raspberry Pi 2B+ which was running Ubuntu and I'd already installed LabVIEW on, but it looks like I must have left it at work before I got made redundant last year. 😕 RIP. I borrowed my fiancé's spare Pi 4B and put Ubuntu 22.04 LTS AMD64 on an SD card using Balena Etcher, but it wouldn't boot from it. I switched to Raspberry Pi Imager to prepare the SD card and got my Ubuntu up and running. Success! But when I went to install the LabVIEW 2023 Q4 package I realised the new Pis use ARM architecture and LabVIEW doesn't support that. Also explains why I didn't have any success with that AMD64 ISO... I decided to use Hyper-V to make myself a VM... nope, I am usi...

I passed the NI CTD Exam with 87%, hurrah!  Here are my thoughts and general advice after having sat the exam. I'll keep quiet on the content, of course...

I'm sitting the CTD exam online at the end of this week. I didn't want to inadvertently give away any info about the exam, so I thought I'd do my post about it now.  Of course, this means that if I fail, I cannot claim that I never sat the exam. Shh. 

I was bored so wrote this VI (while sat on the sofa) which converts US petrol prices to UK petrol prices. I was surprised that there's no site that already does this, but it's a slightly annoying conversion. The UK measures their price in litres, the US measures their price per gallon, and US gallons are smaller than UK gallons. Today fuel in the US costs less than half that of fuel in the UK. I knew it was cheap over there, but didn't realise quite how cheap!   If I was to make the program better, I would use HTTP APIs to get the live prices, but I can't find suitable free APIs and the code would probably require me to get off the sofa and sit at my desk. Nah. It would also be nice to write the code to compare any 2 countries prices, for petrol and diesel. Scope creep.  Code is here: https://github.com/alt14/US-UK_FuelPriceConverter

This year I did Advent of Code  again for the second year running. If you're not familiar with it, it is a set of daily language-agnostic code challenges during December. Here are some thoughts on my experience this year.

Do you use the LVCompare diff tool? I do, all the time now. If you haven't used it before, it's like playing spot the difference between 2 versions of the same VI but LabVIEW will list what is different and take you to the location of the differences. It's great. My favourite uses are: Double checking before committing files that what I think I changed is what I actually changed, to make sure I have good commit notes and didn't do anything by accident Especially when I see a file listed that I didn't think I did any work on... This normally results in reverting it after checking what the difference is! Understanding what someone actually changed, usually when doing code reviews or pull requests If I find what looks like 2 versions of the same file, checking they are actually the same. I had the tool set up to work with my Git GUI of choice, TortoiseGit. I would normally run it by navigating to Windows Explorer, right clicking on a file or a log entry and selecting w...