After a four-year hiatus, the Test and Measurement team was back at it again to create this season’s best LabVIEW ornaments.

“Four years ago, they had a very similar event, and I think that one was spontaneous. They had a Teams meeting one day and said, ‘oh wow, we could actually make these into ornaments!'” Roman Cyliax, Systems Engineer in Chicago, said. “Rachel is the one who brought it back, and we want to make it an annual event.” 

The holiday ornament-making event was not exclusive to Chicago’s Test and Measurement team, as other regional office team members were included.

“There were approximately 10 people from Chicago, and we had a few team members join in virtually from Texas and Seattle,” Milos Popovic, Chicago Systems Engineer, said. “We used the LabVIEW Development Environment. You can make icons for programs; you draw with this very clunky little icon editor, and you can make a 32×32 pixel image, so it’s very pixelated and grainy, but normally it’s enough information to say what a file does.” 

The team got to work and spent a few hours brainstorming, designing, printing, laminating, cutting, and finally adorning the tree with their festive icons.

“We probably made close to 30 ornaments,” Milos said. “We reused a few from the last time we did it just to fill out the tree.” 

From beginning to end, the ornaments took an extensive period of time to curate.

“You make them in the LabVIEW Icon Editor, which is not necessarily the most intuitive place to make an ornament,” Roman said. “You may spend about an hour drafting ideas and making ornaments. It took another hour and a half to cut and laminate the ornaments. In total, I think it took around 3 hours for our team to make the ornaments.” 

With dozens of ornaments made, a few stood out from the crowd.

“The ornament was a Christmas Constructor. In LabVIEW, you have classes. You construct a class, and it’s kind of like a one-function block. Usually, we have a stock image that’s like a construct and there’s maybe a little star next to it,” Roman said. “Rose made one that had the star being the point of a tree, so it was a Christmas Constructor. It was creative!” 

Another favorite was in reference to a quirk in LabVIEW.

“There is this quirk in the Icon Editor itself where you can make stuff transparent, but it doesn’t have a transparency button. There is one specific shade of off white that it interprets as transparency. You can accidentally choose this shade of white, and you think it’s going to be a white background, and then it just ends up being transparent,” Milos said. “There is an icon that has the RGB color code for that shade of white. Someone took the time to take an X-acto knife and cut out each pixel that is that shade of white, so it is see-through only on the text. That one’s pretty good!” 

After an evening of fun and team bonding, it’s clear that this is an event that the team wants to turn into an annual tradition.

“I think we want to make it an annual thing,” Roman said. “It’d be very fun to do it again next year!” 

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