Future LabVIEW Features

[Chris Hibner]

Originally Posted by Greg McKaskle

I don't want to crash this thread to talk about NI stuff, but it would be interesting to hear what sorts of simulation and control features would be most useful. Perhaps if you want to start a new thread to collect feature ideas...

Greg McKaskle

I thought I would get this started. Keep in mind that I'm not much of a LabVIEW guy (Simulink has been my primary tool at work for many years). Some of my requests below may be just because I don't know how to use LabVIEW very well, so if that's the case I'd love to let me know how to get it to do what I want.

Here is what I'd like to see:

1) Real-time filter/transfer function VI's. I've tried using the filter VIs, and it seems like they will take a vector input, filter that vector, and the output is the filtered vector. That's not very useful in real-time. I want it to take a single value for the current time sample, and return a single value as the filtered output for the current time sample. In other words, a real-time filter.

2) Output / data storage VIs that store data as it comes in, like the "To Workspace" or "To File" blocks in Simulink. In my autonomous robot simulator, I probably spent less time doing every other part of the simulator than I spent trying to figure out how to turn a stream of "real-time" samples into a vector so LabVIEW could write it to a file. Just like in (1) above, I want to feed it a single value every time sample, then the VI should just tack the new sample onto the end of what is already there.

I know I have thought of other things, but that is all I can think of for now. I guess what I really want is for ALL of the vectored blocks to have a "real-time", sample-by-sample counterparts.