In improv, there is this idea called “yes and”. The idea is that the first person goes and starts telling a story. The second person (and everyone after them) picks up with “yes and” and then continues adding to the story. What you want to avoid doing is using the word...

I have previously written about setting up LVCompare and LVMerge. I ran into a situation where for whatever reason that solution stopped working for me. I would launch LVMerge or LVCompare and nothing would happen. I tried some troubleshooting and couldn’t figure out why it...

Let’s talk about software design and refactoring in LabVIEW. When I first read Martin Fowler’s Refactoring book several years ago, it was very liberating. Prior to that, I had always had the idea that I had to get things right up front. It was kind of paralyzing. I had the...

I’ve decided to start a new series. I recently bought the book “Joel on Software” by Joel Spolsky. It is a collection of his blog posts. He still continues to produce more content today. Some of the articles in this book are a little dated but they seem to hold up to the...

I haven’t talked a whole lot about VI Analyzer yet. It’s a static code analysis tool. If you come from text-based background, it is similar to a linter. It checks your code against a set of predefined rules and reports back any violations. You do need LabVIEW...

As many of you know, last year Fab co-authored a book on LabVIEW with Richard Jennings. I was fortunate enough that she asked me to review a few chapters for her. As a way of saying thanks for that, she sent me a free copy. I’ve had it for a while. I read a bit of it last year and wrote...

I will start this review off by saying I am not much of an FPGA programmer. I took the NI class over a decade ago and I have an sbRIO dev kit sitting at home that I have played around with, but that is about it. On some previous cRIO projects we had used the FPGA, but someone else wrote the...

A while back GitLab CI deprecated the batch executor for Windows runners. That meant that you could no longer directly call batch scripts from a Gitlab Runner. They had switched over to Powershell. There were workarounds. You could still write a batch script and call it from PowerShell using...

I have been a programmer for over 15 years and a rock climber for over 20. During that time I have seen a lot of changes in both. In some ways, the changes are very similar.

Rapid Growth

Both programming and rock climbing have taken off over the...

So in my Unit Testing Workshop, I talk about taking tests written for libraries and retargetting them to the PPL once the library is built into PLLs. The last time I taught the workshop, someone asked me for an example. I didn’t have a good example to share, so I wrote one.

Why test...

This a follow on article to a couple previous articles: here and here. Its part of a series of tips that Neil Crossan provided me with, dealing with cRIOs and Linux RT targets. He saw a post of mine and sent me a bunch of tips and tricks. I thought I would share some of them with...

This a follow on article to a previous article. Its part of a series of tips that Neil Crossan provided me with, dealing with cRIOs and Linux RT targets. He saw a post of mine and sent me a bunch of tips and tricks. I thought I would share some of them with you here. Many thanks to Neil for...