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 …
Right now, I find myself sitting squarely in the calm before the storm. The final edits for the new pull up banners have been approved. The tradeshow materials have been shipped. Travel plans and final reservations have been made. Now, all that’s left is to pack our bags and catch a flight to Vegas. Over the next several days, five DISTekians will be making the trip to Sin City for ConExpo-CON/AGG 2020.
Somehow we find ourselves at the beginning of September already and for those of us here at DISTek, it means that the annual SAE COMVEC show is just around the corner. This year’s show will once again be held in Rosemont, Illinois at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare September 11th – 13th. DISTek will be involved in several capacities from sales hosting a booth on the exhibit floor to engineering attending the technical sessions and panels to stay up to date on the latest technology. We are also pleased to have one of our own, Daniel Aceituna, featured in an expert panel discussion.
Hardware in the Loop (HiL) systems are used in the development and test of real-time embedded systems often found in Electronic Control Units (ECU) within almost any on- or off-highway vehicle today. HiL systems are comprised of both hardware and software that can simulate the larger entity (i.e. car, tractor, etc.), so that the smaller ECU can be inserted into that larger system to determine whether or not it’s internal real-time embedded system is performing as intended. While this may seem like a mountainous task for vehicle manufacturers in industry today, DISTek has invested in tackling the design and production of an internal HiL solution.
The Present – Part 1
The 2000s were a tumultuous decade, bookended on the front end by the dotcom bubble bursting, Enron collapsing with Arthur Anderson, and the September 11th attacks, and on the backend with the financial crisis and the great recession. In the world of technology, we saw the quick spread of broadband internet and the broad adoption first of cell phones and PDAs before the two merged by the end of the decade into the smartphone. The internet seemed to get its legs in this decade with the advent of such tools as Google Maps, Wikipedia, YouTube, and social media.
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.
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”.
