It’s time again for our monthly LabVIEW user group meeting. The topic this time is Motor Control with LabVIEW.
This meeting will be at Seneca5, Tuesday April 6th at 6:30. We serve pizza, so you can come straight from work.
Check out the LabVIEW Advanced User Group page for more details.
Previously, I posted a listbox control with improved icons. Some have asked if it can be used for multicolumn listboxes, too. Well, yet it can. And here it is.
(Actually, you can just use the listbox control. Right click and select Replace. Replace it with a multicolumn listbox. The new multicolumn box will maintain the improved icons.)
Download VI: MulticolumListBoxIcons2.0
When I head out to my work shed to build something with my tools, the tools I use are picked by one and only one person…me! That’s the way LabVIEW used to be, too, back in the good old days.
Now it’s all about the young kids and their automatic tool selection. La-ti-da! Manual tool selection was good enough for us, and it should be good enough for them too!
I don’t let my work shed tell me when to use a hammer and when to use a screwdriver! And if I ever get any of those new “power tools” I won’t want my shed picking those either!
Prototyping is critical to getting a working design. On a complex new design, no one gets it right the first time — at least no one who is being honest with you.
When prototyping, I have found two opposite extremes that are easy to fall into:
In my day, we knew that LabVIEW was an acronym, so we spelled it with capital VIEW as God intended! We knew it because we were there when it was being made. Sure, the first versions of LabVIEW were icons chiseled on stone tablets, but we liked it that way!
And there is one thing for sure we knew: the VIEW in LabVIEW is an acronym, so it needs to be capitalized.
It is not Labview, LabView, or LABVIEW. It’s LabVIEW!
Maybe we could never remember what the acronym stood for but we knew it was one.
Violent Inhuman Enormous Wildebeest
Vital Inheritance Expense Withholding
Virtually Idiot-proof Enhanced Whatchamagig
It doesn’t matter. It’s an acronym. Now you know. So spell it right!
This time we will be looking into the Houston, we have a problem code in detail. This is the cRIO air jet control system that we demonstrated at the National Instruments User Group in February.
We will have a chance to really dig into the details of the program and discuss the ins and outs of FPGA and RT programming on the cRIO. You will also have a chance to program your own control algorithm for the inverted spring pendulum device. Can you stabilize it? Harder yet, can you make it hold at an arbitrary position? It may be harder than you think!
Come with your laptop, your questions, and your idea for a clever algorithm to control two air jets on a spring.
This meeting will be at Seneca5, Tuesday March 2nd at 6:30. We serve pizza, so you can come straight from work.
Check out the LabVIEW Advanced User Group page for more details.
This month, we presented at the quarterly National Instruments LabVIEW User Group. We had a great turnout! The 27 people that attended crowded the room at Manchester Grill. We had some good food (Thanks NI!) and we had a great time learning about LabVIEW programming on the cRIO FPGA and RT.
Below are pictures of the event and the LabVIEW code for the program that we demonstrated.
We host the regular meeting of the LabVIEW Advanced User Group at our office each month.
This month, we are presenting at the quarterly National Instruments LabVIEW User Group. Details are below.
It is an NI event and lunch will be served, so you do have to register (but its FREE!). Register here
We host the regular meeting of the LabVIEW Advanced User Group at our office each month.
Good vision systems are difficult to engineer. Our brain, as far as computations are concerned, is a very parallel system. It can account for contrast and brightness, recognize and categorize a seemingly endless number of shapes, and set our eyes to focus faster than any commercial camera, all simultaneously. It can also, through the depth perception of having two eyes or through the patterns of experience, give volume to the two dimensional image your eyes obtain.
Replicating these tasks on a computer is nothing short of impossible with today’s level of research and design.
What the computer does well though is sequential logic very quickly. Vision systems use this to their advantage by constraining the vision problem to one task at the time. In the end the computer can attack and solve particular vision problems better than our own vision systems can.
Today we will be detecting the value of an off-the-shelf PSI gauge using NI Vision Builder. Hopefully our solution gives some insight into the current level of vision systems.
Multithread programming in traditional languages can be a challenge. The programmer is responsible for managing many things, such as:
LabVIEW, on the other hand, lends itself easily to multithreaded programming. In fact, if you follow the dataflow rules, multithreading will happen automatically when LabVIEW finds the opportunity.
