In part one of this series, we explored the NI 2023 Technical Sessions “Creating a MeasurementLink Plugin” and “Using Python and TestStand to Boost Your Test Development.” In this part of the series, we will …
Three DISTek engineers from our Fargo, North Dakota office (Justin, Jared, and Matt), recently attended NI Connect 2023 in Austin, Texas, at the Austin Convention Center. NI Connect is formerly known …
About Us: DISTek is hiring! We are a 100% employee-owned company that is actively recruiting for multiple positions in our various locations across the Midwest, including Cedar Falls and Des …
In June of this year I had the opportunity to attend our DISTek-led Modeling and Simulation training course. Currently, I am the lead of the Automation and Test group here at DISTek, but in my previous roles I have been heavily involved in desktop application development, as well as test system development primarily using LabVIEW. My exposure to modeling and embedded has been somewhat limited thus far, so I thought it would be a good experience to learn some of the basics.
Another May and another NIWeek has come and gone. What did you miss this year if you weren’t able to attend? Maybe not as much as you think, at least if you’re interested in advanced technical sessions.
Again this year, there was an advanced session track titled “Software Engineering Processes Architecture and Design (SEPAD).” These sessions were led by LabVIEW Champions and LabVIEW Architects. The majority of these SEPAD sessions were recorded and the videos are available online for viewing.
Acquiring and/or logging high speed data, using the traditional DAQmx scaling approach, will consume considerable amounts of memory due to its use of the double precision data type. Each sample collected will consume eight bytes of memory whether being stored in memory or on disk. This size is fine when collecting data at lower rates, but if you are collecting data at a rate of 1 MS/s, eight bytes per sample is too much for most systems to handle.
For the first time in its 22 year history, NIWeek was held in May instead of August. What did that mean for attendees? No triple digit temperatures for starters.
It’s been a crazy couple of weeks around the office. We’re moving what feels like a thousand miles a minute as we put the final touches on our presentation for CONEXPO-CON/AGG 2017. Yes, you read that right, the DISTek crew is headed to Las Vegas next week for THE international construction industry show. This year’s show is running March 7 – 11 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
A customer has been receiving field failures and the root cause has been difficult to determine. They have ideas of what may be causing these failures and need a test system that can simulate the various conditions and monitor the Device Under Test (DUT) to assist in determining the root cause. The customer turned to DISTek to provide a bench-top setup that will control the DUT and measure multiple in-circuit test points for events that may be damaging field effect transistors (FET) along with recording FET case temperatures. Custom events have been defined by the customer and will trigger the system to capture pre and post-trigger data. The test system should also provide various loads to the output of the DUT.
Welcome back to the blog! Today, I will be talking about how to operate a Cognex smart camera via a LabVIEW program. The way I will be communicating with the camera is via TCP/IP. There are other potential ways to communicate with the camera from LabVIEW, but this was determined to be the best way, giving us the most control over the camera. I will walk through some basic terminology that is necessary to discuss building a Cognex vision test. Then, I will create and set up a vision test and finally, I will briefly describe how to program LabVIEW to send/receive information to the camera and to trigger an image acquisition.
As LCD vehicle displays have become more prevalent and versatile in both on- and off-highway, the time it takes to ensure proper display functionality after a software release has increased dramatically. It is not uncommon for displays to have 15, 20, or even 30 different screens, each of which having multiple sub-selections available. If you take into consideration different supported languages, the scope of the test grows dramatically. DISTek, as a company, is always attempting to define the future needs of customers in the off-highway industry, of which vehicle display testers are one of those needs.
The 22nd Annual NI Week is slated to begin in Austin, Texas, on August 1st. NI Week provides the forum to bring together the brightest minds in engineering and science. More than 3,200 innovators representing a wide spectrum of industries, from automotive and telecommunications to robotics and energy will converge together to discover the latest technology to accelerate productivity for software-defined systems in test, measurement, and control. While DISTek regularly attends in various capacities, this year we will be making a new showing. Our very own Systems Engineer and LabVIEW expert, Ed Dickens, will be presenting on Wednesday, August 3rd from 4:45-5:45PM. His presentation is the result of National Instruments trying something new. This year, for the first time ever, there will be an advanced software topic track where all the presentation topics and content will be prepared and presented by various “LabVIEW Champions”.
