Channel Wires and LabVIEW OO at the LabVIEW User Group Meeting

DMC hosted the Chicagoland LabVIEW User’s Group meeting again at our office this month. Over a dozen local LabVIEW users and National Instruments representatives met to network and share best practices.

We started the meeting with a discussion of channel wires. Channel wires are a new feature in LabVIEW 2016 that allow communication between parallel loops. Channel wire types include streams and tags, which are somewhat analogous to queues and variables. These break the visual dataflow paradigm, which can be very powerful, but also non-intuitive to seasoned LabVIEW developers. As such, the topic elicits varying opinions from the LabVIEW community. In our presentation, we introduced the concept with some use cases and had a lively discussion about benefits, pitfalls, and the future of LabVIEW. 

The discussion was aimed at LabVIEW users who were not familiar with object-oriented development in LabVIEW. We walked through all the steps required to develop an abstract class and concrete classes to implement file I/O operations. This was only an example, so we also discussed how this would be used to develop an abstract DAQ class, and abstract image acquisition class, etc. We continued the discussion by introducing SquareBattle and the role OO plays in the game.

To build upon the concepts of object-oriented programming we taught, we introduced the SquareBattle game that pits your LabVIEW code against other developers. We demonstrated how to create a Square for the competition by inheriting from the base Square.lvclass and overriding the “Run.vi” to implement your own strategy. We encourage user group members to develop their own Squares and bring them to the next meeting to compete.

Attendees enjoyed a lovely dinner provided by NI. After the group discussion, we headed to DMC's rooftop deck to soak in the view and socialize. LabVIEW User Group meetings are always a great opportunity to interact with other local LabVIEW users. Thanks to everyone who attended!