Design Panels for the TestDrive Interface

This section of the manual is written in the assumption that panels designers have basic knowledge of the LabVIEW software. Thus, for more details on LabVIEW refer to your LabVIEW documentation.

Templates

The easiest way to design a new sub-panel for the TestDrive Interface is to copy one of the provided panels and to modify it to suit the needs of the moment.

Test panels are provided with the software; they can be found in the TestDrive folder under the Panels sub-folder.

Whether you want to use a copied panel or design one from scratch, we recommend that you read the following sections.

Signal Names

First, make sure you understand the difference between a label and a caption, in LabVIEW. To simplify, a component's label is more like its identification name while its caption is a descriptive text. For more details on this matter, refer to the Labeling section of Chapter 4 in the LabVIEW User Manual.

When a signal is assigned to a sub-panel component, it is assigned to its caption, not to its label. Therefore, all components' captions must be set to visible.

In LabVIEW, to set caption's visibility on, right-click the sub-panel component and select Properties from the context menu as shown below.

In the Properties dialog box, check the Captions Visible checkbox.

When you assign a signal to a component, if its caption is not visible, the signal name will not be displayed.

In addition to that, you should set the label's visibility to off; this will prevent mistaking labels with captions; this is also done in the Properties dialog box by unchecking the Label's Visible checkbox.

Also, it is very important that each component label be unique. Fortunately, when you insert or copy a component, LabVIEW automatically adapts the new component's label to avoid doubling labels. However, make sure you do not change labels unless you are certain the name is not already used by any other component. This is especially tricky if you already turned off all labels' visibility.

Conversely, captions do not have to be unique.

If two or more components have the same label, TestDrive Interface will be unable to distinguish them, this can result in erroneous signal assignments.

If you need to design a sub-panel from scratch, the subpanel's block diagram must contain an Event Structure. Event structures can be found in the Structures section of the Functions Palette. This is done from the sub-panel's block diagram, as shown in the picture below:

The Event Structure can be left as is. The picture below shows what the Event Structure looks like when it is placed on the block diagram:

If no event structure is placed on the block diagram, the sub-panel will not run in the TestDrive Interface.