One of the presentations I attended at this years Certified LabVIEW Architects summit was given by Darren Nattinger of National Instruments. Darren is a Principal Engineer in LabVIEW R & D. One of the many things he’s responsible for is getting the Quick Drop feature added to LabVIEW. His presentation was titled, ”An End to Brainless LabVIEW Programming”.
In March I attended the Certified LabVIEW Architects Summit (CLA) in Austin, Texas. Every year National Instruments hosts this conference where CLAs can network, discuss best practices, and share ideas. This year the theme was Continuous Improvement: Building Better LabVIEW Applications.
Designing an HiL test system, need to modernize your laboratory, or do you just dabble in LabVIEW in your spare time? Meet DISTek’s system designers and LabVIEW architects at NI Days Chicago October 15. DISTek engineers will be at booth 19 to answer any questions you may have, maybe even that tough engineering question that has been eluding you. Put them to the challenge and see what they can do for you.
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.
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.
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.
Last month we discussed a little bit about what National Instruments DAQmx and Measurement Studio are and how they can be used to create .NET applications which leverage National Instruments data acquisition hardware. This month we are going to jump in to a high-level practical explanation on how to get started doing data acquisition in .NET.
National Instruments provides a wide array of data acquisition hardware for use in many platforms, operating systems, and busses. The most common way provided to interface with the hardware is through the NI-DAQmx drivers. These DAQmx drivers can be used to interface with hundreds of different DAQ devices across several different application development platforms. In this three part blog series, we are going to explore specifically how to use National Instruments data acquisition hardware in .NET applications. Part one will introduce a little bit of background into DAQmx and Measurement Studio. Part two will explain how to get started in adding National Instruments hardware to your .NET project. Finally, part three will provide some examples for hybrid systems combining LabVIEW and .NET as a way to fully utilize National Instruments hardware while retaining the advantages of .NET.
Until about a month ago, all of my experience writing code had been with text-based languages like C and Java. I had mostly written code to command microcontrollers or for signal processing. C allowed me a very procedural view of how the microcontroller would execute the code. One line of code could tell the microcontroller to turn on an LED and the next could tell it to turn the LED off, and the microcontroller would always execute the first line first and the second line second. Then I started at DISTek and learned how to code in LabVIEW. LabVIEW is quite the departure from text-based languages. I would like to describe how LabVIEW compares to text-based languages and some of my experiences learning LabVIEW as a new software developer.
If you have lots of data or find yourself doing repetitive tasks with small sets of data, then you might want to consider NI DIAdem software to navigate, view, analyze, and report your data.
More new hardware was introduced including a small Real-Time/FPGA target called the NI System on Module. () The NI System on Module (SOM) combines the Xilinx Zynq FPGA, common components like memory, and a complete middleware solution, delivering a complete embedded platform that minimizes design time and risk for any embedded control or monitoring application. The NI SOM also ships with NI Linux Real-Time, which combines the performance of a real-time operating system with the openness of Linux. Along with a vast community, Linux allows the freedom to choose how you program the processor, using either LabVIEW system design software or C/C++ with Eclipse.
The technical sessions seemed to highlight the NI Systems Engineering Group this year. The NI systems Engineering group is responsible for creating frameworks, reference designs and add-on LabVIEW toolkits. These packages are originally created for use within NI but are made available to outside developers as well.
