Entries for 'Leon Grossman'

The LAVA BBQ at Scholz Garten was last night here at NI week.  I managed to score one of the last tickets and was offered the chance to catch a cab over to the venue.  I declined on the cab because I had been sitting in sessions all day and wanted the chance to stretch my legs.  The venue is only a mile away and I'm a city dweller - "how hard can it be?".  As it turns out,... [Read the rest of this blog...]

As Darren already posted in his blog post about attending NI week, the DMC trio of me, Ashley and Darren are all here learning about the new things happening with NI and there are some exciting new products being released.  I am currently installing LabVIEW 2011 as I write this blog post! I had a chance to stop at the NI booth where they had an old Mac Plus setup to run an original... [Read the rest of this blog...]

WCF web services can be integrated into LabVIEW but is not as easy as you might hope.

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It is often desired to have "occasionally connected" applications where a device may not always be connected to a network and that makes the task of maintaining a central data store such as SQL Server 2008R2 consistent across multiple devices and users an extremely challenging task.  Fortunately, Microsoft has created Microsoft Sync Services (sync services) to address... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Source Code Control (SCC) is universally acknowledged by developers as an important part of developing and maintaining projects.  Effective use of takes discipline because what is not checked into the repository is not saved.  Opening a project several years after the fact to find out that the latest code resided on a long decommissioned computer is not a pleasant experience.  ... [Read the rest of this blog...]

I recently had the experience of working on a Visual Basic.NET 1.1 application that our company created a number of years ago.  This brought the whole issue of maintaining legacy code into sharp focus.  Legacy industrial software could easily take up several blog entries on its own so we will focus specifically on Visual Basic 6 and .NET (Visual Basic.NET or C#). For a blog entry on wor... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Last month I attended the inaugural meeting of the Chicago LabVIEW User Group.  A group of about thirty fellow LabVIEW users gathered in Schaumburg for the first event. Traditionally, User Groups hearken back to the early tech days of subsets of passionate, like-minded fans trading ideas and discussions around a specific product or technology.  Sponsored by National Instruments, the Use... [Read the rest of this blog...]

While it is usually preferable to avoid mixing development environments for a project, sometimes we need to create a mixed platform solution.  In a recent project, I needed to create a class library in C# to interact with a LabVIEW 2009 SP1 application. I fired up Visual Studio 2010 and created a quick .Net 4 application.  On attempting to create a constructor in LabVIEW, I got the erro... [Read the rest of this blog...]

 I recently implemented a project where we were using a SICK Ranger camera to measure a part.  This camera works by measuring the position of light from a line generating laser on its 2D field of view and translating that to a height position.  This works because features that are higher and closer to the camera will be closer to the top of the camera's 2D field of view and thi... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Some data acquisition applications using LabVIEW require an ultimately stable clock reference.  In these cases there are a number of options, such as GPS, for generating a clock reference that is more accurate than your DAQ board can attain on its own.  Most, however, don't require this kind of absolute accuracy and we can rely on the internal clock of the DAQ board in use. In... [Read the rest of this blog...]

National Instruments LabVIEW is one of our core development languages here at DMC.  With four architects on staff, we often ask ourselves questions about the way LabVIEW behaves that most other people don't need to worry about. While performance optimizing a project, I replaced some complex math with formula nodes and realized a significant improvement in performance with this simp... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Many of the LabVIEW applications that DMC develops are based on our internally developed state machine architecture. This architecture has a proven record of allowing us to create flexible, robust, and easy to maintain applications. One of our clients has a large, multi-PC system built upon this platform which has been in use for a period of years. The architecture allowed several addit... [Read the rest of this blog...]

 DMC started as a motion integrator (the M stands for motion).  Even though we do a great many other things these days, we still maintain a strong competency in this area.   We were recently contacted by a client who has an old Acroloop 2000 ISA based motion controller running on a Windows NT with 32MB of RAM.  Their concern was that parts to repair this legacy motion equipme... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Photography is one of those hobbies that you can put your entire disposable income into and still want to spend more.  It is also one of those hobbies that rewards you with the occasional gem that leaves you feeling good about your investment. We recently went on a fireworks cruise with staff from DMC (Frank Riordan, Darren Jones and Eric Nielsen), Argonne National Laboratory, and ... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Data managment in Test and Measurement applications is critical to the usability of the final product.  It is no use to acquire data if you can't use it.  Traditionally, we would write data out into some form of tab delimited text file.  This works really well but has some significant drawbacks in larger file size and loss of precision. Enter TDMS, a file format created by National... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Some time ago, the staff of the Advanced Powertrain Research Facility at Argonne National Laboratory asked me if we could create a robotic driver to control speed of a vehicle on their dynamometer.  There are off-the-shelf solutions for this task but it would be difficult to get the level of configurability and integration needed with these systems. We used LabVIEW to develop a relative... [Read the rest of this blog...]

 I recently spent a pleasant Sunday in Rantoul, IL at the Champaign County Sports Car Club autocross with some engineers from the Advanced Powertrain Research Facility group of Argonne National Laboratory.  I’ll post about the distributed LabVIEW data acquisition (DAQ) system we’ve created for them in another post.  This entry is all about cars. If you aren’t familiar with autocros... [Read the rest of this blog...]