Notes from the Embedded Systems Conference
This year the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) was held in Boston, Silicon Valley and will be held in Minneapolis later this year.
DISTek Family Picnic
DISTek hosted their annual summer event at George Wyth State Park in Waterloo, Iowa this year. The family friendly picnic took place in the early evening hours of Friday, July 17th. DISTek employees, spouses, and their families were invited to come together for food, fun, and camaraderie .
NI Week, Y’all
The 2015 National Instruments NI Week was a real eye opener for me. From a sales perspective, it was amazing to see just how many of the top companies in their field use NI products so pervasively.
ISOBUS Task Controller: Part 5
In this final installment of the ISOBUS Task Controller (TC) series, I will cover a few other features of TC that are relatively new.
Engineering the Start: FIRST LEGO League
Shawn Pezley, father, mentor, and coach, delves into the value of FIRST Lego League.
ISOBUS Task Controller: Part 4
In Part 3 of my Task Controller series, I promised to get this Part 4 out close to the time of Spring Plugfest … and I missed by over a month. Regardless, here is Part 4.
In this Task Controller (TC) series, I have detailed data collection and variable-rate application. The final big feature of TC is Section Control. This feature also has an ISOBUS Functionality called TC-SC. Most people have an idea what section control is, but for the uninitiated … section control will turn on/off various controllable sections of an implement to avoid overlap in a field.
Systems Thinking
I’ve recently been developing a deeper, more passionate skillset for the ever-so important topic of “system” engineering. Our team just completed the creation of a model to simulate a simple tank, where our embedded software would monitor and dispense product from the tank, and our “plant” model would take the output of our embedded software, “act” as the actual product the software is controlling, and provide our software with inputs so it knows how to control the outputs, thus creating a closed-loop system. This helps us simulate and test our control strategy in a simulated environment.
Automated Test Reports with NI DIAdem
In a recent project, I implemented an automated report generator using NI DIAdem. DIAdem uses templates and Windows scripting to parse, analyze, and display test results. This capability can save significant time for the test engineers while inspecting, analyzing, and graphing test results.
DAQmx in Measurement Studio: Part 3
The last two months we have covered how to do data acquisition in .NET. This month we will go over how to integrate LabVIEW and .NET together in a hybrid application. I am going to demonstrate how to use a LabVIEW server application to acquire data using DAQmx and send it to a .NET client application. The client can then display the data using more visually appealing Microsoft controls and then sends the data back to the server to demonstrate two-way TCP communication.
ALPHA Students Visit DISTek
On Friday May 1, DISTek hosted about 50 junior high ALPHA (Talented & Gifted) students from Holmes and Peet Junior Highs in Cedar Falls. These students completed a 6-week unit in January and February on careers and were interested in engineering fields. The purpose of their visit to DISTek was to learn more about the various types of engineering.
ISOBUS Spring 2015 Plugfest Wrap-up
Last week in Lincoln, NE, engineers from around the world converged for another ISOBUS Plugfest to test their ISOBUS devices with other manufacturers’ ISOBUS devices. If you do not know what ISOBUS is, then you probably have not read any of my previous blog posts! At the crux of ISOBUS is the ability to connect many different types of electronic components together from different manufacturers and have them all work together. So Plugfest provides the opportunity to test that all the different equipment works well together.
Sustainable Farming
Back in February, I attended the World of Ag Expo in Tulare California. While there, I noticed something was featured more prominently at this show as opposed to the shows I regularly attend in the Midwest.
Organic and sustainable farming booths and displays were everywhere, which, if you drove to the show from say Fresno, you saw multiple signs highlighting the prolonged drought they are in the midst of.
