NI Week puts ‘Poetry in motion’

National Instruments kicks off its NI Week 2008 with LabVIEW enhancements, new technologies and an emphasis on green.

By Jack Smith, Managing Editor August 8, 2008

Thomas Dolby’s “She blinded me with science” played as Dr. James Truchard took the stage to kick off NI Week 2008 in Austin, TX. In his keynote address on Tues. Aug. 5, Truchard passionately described the milestones that National Instruments reached — and exceeded — since last year’s event. As NI’s president, CEO and co-founder, Truchard enthusiastically highlighted enhancements to LabVIEW, wireless DAQ, embedded single board RIO and emphasized the company’s green engineering movement. Senior vice president of R&D, Tim Dehne, accompanied Truchard in a dynamic presentation loaded with multiple product demonstrations.LabVIEW leverages its graphical programming language power to take advantage of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and multi-core processors. Building on its two-decade legacy, NI announced the launch and availability of its LabVIEW 8.6 , which is designed to give engineers a single platform to easily create distributed measurement systems to acquire data remotely, and to increase test and control system throughput and reduce the development time of high-performance FPGA-based control and embedded prototyping applications.NI also announced 10 new Wi-Fi and Ethernet data acquisition (DAQ) devices, which extend the NI hardware and software platform to wireless remote monitoring applications. The new wireless and Ethernet DAQ devices include built-in signal conditioning and direct sensor connectivity for electrical, physical, mechanical and acoustic signals. By combining Wi-Fi DAQ with the LabVIEW software platform, engineers and scientists have more tools for wireless structural diagnostics, environmental and machine condition monitoring applications.

Duran Duran’s “Rio” was the musical introduction that foreshadowed the announcement of NI’s Single Board RIO devices. The eight new sbRIO-96xx devices combine an embedded real-time processor, reconfigurable FPGA and analog and digital I/O on a single printed circuit board (PCB). These new devices are designed to offer engineers a low-cost, integrated hardware option for deploying embedded control and data acquisition applications that require flexibility, high performance and reliability in a small form factor. Naturally, engineers can use the LabVIEW graphical system design platform to customize Single-Board RIO hardware as well as develop their embedded systems for increased productivity and shorter time to market.With growing concern about energy, environment and all things green, NI is continuing its Green Engineering movement. Measure it. Fix it. is a Green Engineering approach that uses measurement and control techniques to design, develop and improve products, technologies and processes that are intended to benefit the environment as well as to increase profitability. NI’s graphical system design platform provides measurement, automation and design tools to enable engineers to measure and understand real-world data, so they can design and develop technologies to minimize environmental impact and raise profitability by designing more efficient products and processes. According to Truchard, 25% of NI’s customers are going green through the optimization of machines and processes.For more NI Week 2008 coverage from our sister magazine Control Engineering , click here .