Entries for the 'LabVIEW' Category

What is it? Many developers may be familiar with the concept of a logging platform. Essentially, a logging platform is a modular system that is designed to be plugged into a project and allow the system to keep a time-stamped record of events with minimal effect on execution time or system resources. Think of it as a journal of a program’s execution. One of the most commonly used logging pla... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Let’s face it, engineers and scientists like graphs.  It’s very common for a user to desire an image capture of data displayed in their program to share with their friends and colleagues.  There’s quite a few nice features native to LabVIEW that makes this process easy and convenient.  Here is a description of three good options:  Manual Save, Programmatic Save, and Save E... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Our new deck isn't the only way we're expanding our ceiling here at DMC.  We're very proud to build on our technical dominance with new LabVIEW certifications! Congratulations to our newest LabVIEW Certified Architects, Jesse Batsche and Danny Budzinski! They join Leon Grossman, Jody Koplo, and me on DMC's team of experts.  The coveted LabVIEW Architect status is the highest possib... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Like any university, LabVIEW U wasn't just about courses.  Part of the joy of attending NIWeek was experiencing Austin with my coworkers and hanging out with other engineers. We had the good luck of staying right by the Congress Avenue Bridge.  This bridge appears misleadingly mundane until exactly sundown when millions of bats begin streaming from its concrete underbelly.... [Read the rest of this blog...]

When I talk with other graphical designers and hardware gurus here in Austin and mention that this is my first NIWeek, their eyes light up. “I still remember my first NIWeek! How do you like it?” they ask. Across the board our first impressions match: there are just so many people here, from all corners of the world, who are involved with LabVIEW! That may sound obvious and trivial, but really it’... [Read the rest of this blog...]

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...]

It's great to be back in Austin Texas for the annual National Instruments NIweek conference. Today is the first official day of the conference, where the largest ever audience (3300 people!) will be introduced to the latest products, trends, markets, and emerging technologies. We kicked things off at Alliance Day yesterday, where the day's keynote and sessions are dedicated to NI's partner netwo... [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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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...]

Ever wish you could replicate the NI Measurement and Automation Explorer interfaces in LabVIEW code? You can! Download DMC DAQmx Assistant Tools For years I have been looking for a good implementation of NI MAX that I could encapsulate and throw into my LabVIEW apps so that customers can edit measurement channels, scaling, calibration, etc. from inside of my application instead of havi... [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...]

DMC will join leading companies to host the National Instruments Technical Symposium that builds on the success of NIWeek, the worldwide virtual instrumentation conference and exhibition held annually in Austin, Texas, where the company is headquartered. NIWeek 2010 concluded in August with attendance of more than 2,500 people, who participated in hands-on training, interactive technical sessions,... [Read the rest of this blog...]

Testing your BMS is a necessity. Determining a strategy to complete that testing is not so easy.  It is tempting to over focus on hardware cost minimization, which must be weighed against the cost of ineffective or incomplete testing.  Here we explore three different strategies for balancing hardware cost with performance.

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Upon first seeing the automated Battery Management System Test Stand DMC recently developed, people tended to ask the same question: "Why is it so tall?" .  Here are three good answers for why DMC deliberately choose that structure to benefit the customer in the long term.

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Recently DMC put together another BMS Validation Test Stand for testing the BMS inside a PHEV battery pack.  Before we shipped it, we wanted to demonstrate the basic capabilities of the battery cell simulators, software, and other electronics. 

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So I've been using National Instruments hardware now for 15 years and programming in LabVIEW for 10.  First, that makes me feel pretty old.  Second, why is it that this is the first year I have gone to NI week?  I don't know.  But I finally understand why everyone else makes such a big deal about attending. It is a great time.  You get to network with a bunch of grea... [Read the rest of this blog...]

DMC is hitting the ground running at NIWeek 2010.  "It's Time".  This is the theme of the keynote of the first official day of NIWeek.  Time to develop, real-time control, timing for data synchronization, time to market,  everything that involves time, and how NI products can help. This is the first official day of the conference, but the second for DMC, as again this... [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...]

This is part one of my blog series detailing the use and optimization of the TDMS format. Here is a table of contents for all blogs in this series: LabVIEW Data Storage: Overview of TDMS LabVIEW Data Storage: TDMS Performance Tweaking LabVIEW Data Storage: TDMS Usage Case Study   Here at DMC, almost all of our LabVIEW applications acquire data at one point or another. This data... [Read the rest of this blog...]