How Do I Change Colors and Color Ranges on a Meter Control in LabVIEW?

Updated Oct 4, 2024

Environment

Software

  • LabVIEW

I am using a meter control, but would like to specify the colors and color ranges myself. How do I change colors and color ranges on a meter control?

There are two ways you can change the color ranges, from the front panel or programmatically.


From the Front Panel:

To change the color ranges and colors from the front panel, right click on the meter and select Marker Spacing»Arbitrary. This will show how the color ranges are broken up.

Next, move the borders of the colors by selecting a number and typing a new value for it.

To add a new color band, right click on the meter and select Add Marker. Use the Set Color tool from the Tools Palette to change each individual color band.

It may be easier to select the individual color bands if you first turn off Interpolate Colors by again right clicking on the meter and ensuring Interpolate Colors is not checked.

After all the color ranges are set up, select Marker Spacing»Uniform to move the markers back to a uniform distribution. This will not affect the color ranges.


Programmatically:

To change the colors and color ranges programmatically, first create a property node by right-clicking on the meter on the block diagram, then selecting Create»Property Node»Scale»Marker Values Property. The format of the data type is an array of clusters. Each cluster has a numeric value and a color in it.

If you would like to change the text and background color scale marker, select Create»Property Node»Scale»Marker Colors on the block diagram.

To put color values into each cluster use Color Box Constants. To create one of these constants on the block diagram, select Functions»Numeric»Additional Numeric Constants»Color Box Constant. Then use the paintbrush tool to right-click on the constant and choose your color. A snippet is shown below.


Note: This image is a LabVIEW snippet, which includes LabVIEW code that you can reuse in your project. To use a snippet, right-click the image, save it to your computer, and drag the file onto your LabVIEW diagram.