Dashboard Front Panel trouble

[Radical Pi]

I am working on the dashboard for our team and I have hit a slight graphical roadblock. You know those arrows pointing left and right above the camera feed? I want to make an up and down version for our lifting mechanism. However, I can't figure out how to make a flat triangular boolean control. Does anybody know how?

[umangv620]

I am clueless when it comes to coding the dashboard, but for the front panel, just use a regular boolean switch and label it up and down. place it between the left and right arrows, and it wont be confusing at all(i hope). That should do what you are trying to do without any coding problems.

[Alan Anderson]

I managed to do it, but I don't think I can explain it well. Use the LabVIEW help index to find "customizing, parts of indicators (how-to)". It steps you through a lot of it. The way I did it was to place a boolean indicator LED and a decoration of the appropriate shape (e.g. an up-pointing triangle), copy the decoration, and "import image" into the LED. The necessary steps include right-clicking the LED and choosing Advanced->Customize from the popup menu, and clicking the "Change to Customize Mode" wrench icon. I think I ended up importing the image into both the on and off states of the LED, and I had to change the color using the Properties menu.

I'm sorry if this is too vague, but I'm definitely not thinking clearly enough to give a step-by-step recipe this late at night.

[Doug Norman]

There is another sneaky trick you can use to create your own Boolean glyphs. You can draw them in the icon editor (double-click on the icon in the upper right corner of a VI to edit it). I typically use a new Untitled VI to draw my glyphs. Once you have the glyph you want, type Ctrl-c (in the editor) to copy it to the clipboard. You now have a glyph ready to paste when you edit a Boolean indicator.

On a separate VI, drop a Flat Square Button: To do this, right-click on the front panel and go to Classic>>Classic Boolean>>Flat Square Button. Highlight the button and then in the menus click Edit>>Customize Control... A new window will open where you can edit your control. Right-click on the control and choose Import Picture from Clipboard>>True for your T glyph and Import Picture from Clipboard>>False for your F glyph. When you are done, choose File>>Save to save your custom control.

One limitation to this approach is you are limited by the size of the VI icon (32x32), but I find this to be good for most of my custom Booleans.

Attached is a zip that contains an up arrow control and a down arrow control I created using this method.

[Greg McKaskle]

Alan is correct. The left right were made by starting with a simple button such as the circle, then importing graphics. If you are not going to color them, PNGs or vector graphics work well. If you aren't up to that and are using BMPs, you'll want to match the BG color. Or, you can use one of the built-in vector graphics in the Decorations palette.

The steps for customizing a button are to go into the control editor by right-clicking>>Advanced>>Customize. In the new window, you can right click on the button and the Import Picture from Clipboard pull-right will let you replace the True and False images. To get an image on the clipboard, you can go to a drawing package select and Copy -- easiest, but you typically end up with a rectangular BMP. You can use Edit>>Import Picture to Clipboard -- which will allow you to use saved images such as PNGs and GIFs. And finally, you can borrow graphics from pretty much anything you see in LV. In this case, you can drop a decoration such as the flat up triangle, select, Cut, and it is on the clipboard. If you want to borrow a control graphic that isn't in decorations, but already part of a control, in the control editor, you click on the wrench/tweezer button on the toolbar, and when in tweezer mode, you can right-click on control elements and Copy to Clipboard.

You want to Import the same image to both True and False and color them differently, it sound like. Of you can color them in an external editor and import different images for True and False. The decal, by the way, is displayed for both True and False images. When you close the window, it will ask if you want to save this as a .ctl. This is useful if you'll use this customized part in the future without having to copy/paste from this usage. You can easily put .ctls into the palette for example. And finally, you do want to replace the original control with the modified one.

Greg McKaskle

[Radical Pi]

Thanks, I got it working!