NI Week 2010 Recap

NI senior executive team in panel discussion with media. (I also caught the Austin staple--Shiner Bock.)

NI Week is always a busy and exhausting time. But always very informative. The co-founders of National Instruments--James Truchard and Jeff Kodosky--are forward thinkers, always looking at trends, technologies. They set the tone for NI's inquisitive culture. Truchard, or Dr. T as he's known in Austin, is still diving deep into Google searches. He doesn't settle for one or two or even 10 pages when he searches. And he still has a penchant for stopping by someone's desk and asking if they had ever thought about something, and then asking them to do a little investigating. Likewise Kodosky is always at the forefront of computer science thinking about how to make LabView better.

They are also engineering intensive. During his remarks at a session with media, Dr. T. pondered the recent engineering crises from BP in the Gulf to Toyota and even to Apple's "antennagate." Although BP was a failure of engineering, he wondered if there were a management-created environment that allowed mistakes. As for Toyota, he wondered if perhaps management was worrying more about the bottom line than cars. Apple perhaps had too much of its own "religion," that is, they are so good at design that they didn't think about the engineering aspects of the antenna design. In his keynote, Kodosky pondered how to account for time within a programming language. OK, that sounds esoteric, but I appreciated his thoughts, and I'm sure most of the close to 3,000 attendees appreciated them, too. In the media session, Kodosky was asked if productivity tools would put engineers out of jobs. "Increased productivity means that engineers can do more," he replied.

NI Week has expanded from product training and feedback to hosting a number of special forums. There was a "Big Physics" (think CERN) forum. I attended the closing panel discussion from the "Clean Energy Technology - the Ultimate Deployment Challenge - Industry Experts Panel."

Panelists were:

Allan Schurr, VP Strategy, IBM Global Energy and Utilities Industry

Robert Metcalfe, inventor, founder of 3Com and now a venture capitalist investing in energy

Don Cortez, vp Distribution support, CenterPoint Energy

Karl Rabago, vp distributed energy services, Austin Energy

Owen Golden, vp energy, NI

The exchange was energetic with at times disparate views on how the energy crisis can be solved ranging from Metcalfe's more "radical" capitalism stance from Rabago's acceptance of government investing and regulation roles. A couple of highlights. Golden discussed data acquisition, analytics and algorithms that are helping electricity delivery companies find problems more quickly and even point to developing problems so that they can be fixed before they break. Metcalfe drew a parallel with drug discovery. In that industry, large companies know how to partner with smaller, innovative, venture-backed companies in order to bring new drugs to market. "Large energy companies need to learn this same partnering with small alternative energy or other small VC-backed companies," he concluded.

Here is an interesting Web site to bookmark.

Here are some of the products NI announced.

An Ethernet-based NI CompactDAQ modular data acquisition system combines the ease of use and low cost of a data logger with the performance and flexibility of modular instrumentation. NI cDAQ-9188  chassis is designed to hold eight I/O modules for measuring up to 256 channels of electrical, physical, mechanical or acoustic signals in a small (25 by 9 by 9 cm), rugged form factor and offering more than 50 different I/O modules. It features a standard Gigabit Ethernet infrastructure. In addition, NI CompactDAQ  simplifies initial setup with zero configuration networking technology and a built-in, Web-based configuration and monitoring utility.

NI CompactDAQ uses patented NI Signal Streaming technology to deliver high-bandwidth data over Ethernet to a host computer. NI Signal Streaming provides the ability to maintain bidirectional analog and digital waveforms continuously over a TCP/IP connection. With NI-STC3 timing and synchronization technology, each chassis also can manage up to seven separate hardware-timed I/O tasks at different sample rates, including analog I/O, digital I/O and counter/timer operations. The chassis operate in a temperature range of -20 to 55 degrees Celsius and can withstand up to 30 g shock and 3 g vibration, making NI CompactDAQ ideal for demanding test applications on the benchtop, in the field or on the production line.

In addition to the Ethernet chassis, the NI CompactDAQ platform includes a four- and an eight-slot USB chassis and NI C Series I/O modules. NI offers more than 50 C Series modules to use interchangeably in NI CompactDAQ systems, each of which is hot-swappable and auto-detectable for simplified setup. C Series modules offer integrated signal conditioning and multiple connectivity options to create custom, mixed-measurement systems specific to the needs of an application. A single analog input module, for example, can acquire up to four channels of simultaneous 1 MS/s voltage inputs for measuring high-speed signals such as ballistic pressure or ultrasonic transducers.

NI-DAQmx driver software, which is included with NI CompactDAQ, goes beyond a basic device driver to deliver increased productivity and performance. With NI-DAQmx, engineers and scientists can log data for simple experiments or develop a complete test system in NI LabView, NI LabWindows/CVI, ANSI C/C++ or Microsoft Visual Studio .Net. Furthermore, a consistent API means that an application developed for an NI CompactDAQ USB chassis will work with an NI CompactDAQ Ethernet chassis without any changes to software.

The NI 9157 and NI 9159 MXI-Express RIO chassis and NI 9148 Ethernet RIO chassis, which in addition to the existing NI 9144 EtherCAT chassis, extend the company’s offering of high-channel-count expansion chassis on a variety of buses. Built on NI reconfigurable I/O (RIO) technology, these chassis deliver the benefits of field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based hardware and C Series I/O  to applications requiring hundreds, or even thousands, of channels. Each expansion chassis contains a Xilinx FPGA that is programmable with the NI LabView FPGA Module, giving engineers the flexibility of high-speed and customizable I/O timing, inline processing and control.

The new MXI-Express RIO 14-slot expansion chassis with onboard Virtex-5 FPGAs offer a high-end solution for large applications that require high channel counts, mixed I/O for a variety of measurements and custom signal processing and control algorithms. The MXI-Express link delivers high bandwidth for streaming data to and from multiple chassis from a single controller, offering hundreds of C Series module slots and thousands of channels of analog, digital and communication I/O including strain, acceleration, channel-to-channel isolated voltage input and simultaneous voltage. The new chassis are ideal for hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing, industrial machine monitoring and complex research applications.

Trips

Another busy week with two full days of lost writing time. But--there were two meetings where companies were celebrating 10 years of success. On Monday, Wes and I had a conference call with folks from Rockwell Automation Safety who were touting the company's success in that market ten years after it made a decision to jump into the market with both feet. ARC Advisory Group recently anointed it the market leader in combined machine and process, and in machine safety.

Then while I was in Chicago, Yokogawa representatives visited the Summit Publishing offices with its latest DAQ station (data acquisition) celebrating the company's success with its data acquisition product line--also after 10 years. 1999 must have been a good year. It was a good briefing bringing up to date with the latest Yokogawa products organization and giving us a good feel for the data acquisition product line.

I went to Chicago for an all-day briefing at Mitsubishi Electric Automation in Vernon Hills. There were no new announcements, but the company's new automation platforms built on the IQ series seem to be catching on. According to its calculations, Mitsubishi is perhaps the overall second in market share in its combined automation markets. The US branch has reorganized marketing over the past couple of years, and if they can get some marketing communications going, you'll recognize the name as an automation player over here.

NI Week 2009

The annual National Instruments "geek bash" called NI Week was held August 4 through 6 in Austin, Texas. President and co-founder James Truchard (Dr. T) greeted a record crowd in the opening keynote with a remark about how the "financial engineers" who helped create the mess we're in should go back and do "real engineering" to help get us out. "Math the way it's been taught in business schools has serious flaws." Warren Buffet, he said, called it a "false perception" of reality. In a later meeting with editors, he said that business schools are trying to apply the laws of physics to an area with a lot more variation.

Truchard used this a jumping off place to promote the added "real-time" math capabilities in the latest revision of the company's flagship programming platform--LabView 2009. The new release also moves LabView more heavily into systems design. Truchard then went on to tackle a Business Week headline about not enough innovation by pointing out the many ways LabView users have been innovating.

NI is a company that prides itself on technological innovation. Some companies may be sales-driven, a few may be marketing-driven, but NI is still a nimble, technology-driven company. And nowhere is this seen like the latest release of LabView and its supporting cast of hardware.

NI is a company that prides itself on technological innovation. Some companies may be sales-driven, a few may be marketing-driven, but NI is still a nimble, technology-driven company. And nowhere is this seen like the latest release of LabView and its supporting cast of hardware.

The latest generations of chips are fertile field for NI engineers. Intel's multicore microprocessors offer the opporunity to show off LabView's inherent parallelism. With LabView, programmers can target parts of programs to run on separate cores of the processor and then be reassembled to accomplish its task. For example, data acquisition and analysis could run on one core at the same time another core is driving the display. Meanwhile another core could be controlling some I/O.

My introduction to field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) many years ago was their application as a prototyping platform--not as a production microprocessor chip. That has changed. LabView has supported FPGAs for a number of years creating products than can change personality through software. Now, the company is demonstrating the power and speed of the devices allowing it to ramp up data acquisition speeds to a level unthought of a few years ago.

NI Co-founder and "father of LabView" Jeff Kodosky wondered during his keynote why computer science departments have not seized upon LabView for courses in parallel programming, since it's the only graphical platform for doing it. LabView is not inherently sequential as are text-based languages. It operates with parallel data flow rather than sequential control.

NI has dipped into the wireless sensor network arena--but in its own terms and in its own way. It unveiled WSN nodes build with IEEE 802.15.4 radios that connect in a "mesh" networking topology. The protocol stack is ZigBee with modifications for things NI needed, for example NI believes that computing devices communicate using Internet Protocol (IP), so its engineers wanted to incorporate that into the network. Mentioned almost as an aside is one of the most powerful parts of the entire system--LabView embedded on a node. It won't be a full-blown version of LabView, but it will be enough that a node can be a controller, or at least an analyzer of raw data, before reporting status and information back to the system.

SolidWorks has become a partner to the extent that "soft motion control" in LabView can team up with the computer aided design (CAD) environment at the design stage so that mechanical and electrical/control engineers can collaborate at an early project stage and see what a machine can do before cutting chips on the factory floor. This partnership has the potential for a powerful leap forward in machine design.