Labview: A Ballsorter

[Los Frijoles]

Well, I just finished off my first working robot program with LabView and I do have to say: I am now converted. It was really really easy in the whole picture of things and I see some real possibilities for next year. I only wish I was not going off to college next year so I could program the robot this way.

I used a FischerTechnik RoboPro module and building set along with a couple libraries that my teacher pulled out of nowhere to create a marble sorter.

As I was programming, the possibility occoured to me that this might possibly introduce the possibility for a psuedo-multithread-esque program since the NI controller uses something of an FPGA I believe (correct me if I am wrong). I also found that there are some things which I believe to be quite inefficient:

1. I had to use Case statements to simulate an if () {} sequence
2. The equivilent of var++ was an add 1 to a value sequence which involved several numeric constants
3. Sometimes the wires get tangled and are hard to distinguish...is there any way to change the color? Right now it is based on the type of the variable being passed down the wire (green = bool, blue = #)
4. The control/tools/modules/whatever panel got in the way of programming in the block diagram view and got quite frustrating with having to move it around. Is there any way to circumvent this?

I will probably have video of the marble/ballsorter on youtube tomorrow when I remember to bring my camera to school...