On Leadership, Manufacturing

Essay on leadership--including R&D leadership change at National Instruments and the HP fiasco--plus a quick review of Daniel Pink's "Drive." Audio version.

Automation Minutes 94

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.

Video Essay about NI Week

Here's a video essay from NI Week. Day 3 keynotes feature students and a noted guest. This year's keynote was not a disappointment. Three groups of college students accepted various challenges including building an electric car (and driving it cross-country), building a more environmentally friendly car, and finally building a car that a blind person can drive. Finally, Dr. Mishio Kaku, noted theoretical physicist and TV personality, discussed the future. 

He closed with an interesting thought that relates to my dialoge with Martin Ford (see here and here and here) by discussing the types of jobs that will dominate in the future.

NI Week 2010 About Innovation

I'm at the Day 3 keynotes of NI Week. This day is dedicated to students of all ages doing cool engineering projects. Right now they're talking electric car development.  Now it's ecocar challenge with students from Virginia Tech.

James Truchard's (Dr. T) keynote highlighted innovation (unlike the typical CEO keynote that focuses on business performance). Quotes from Edison highlighted the idea of developing a method of doing innovation. NI is continually innovative and has enhanced its Web-based community of partners to bring in more ideas and innovations. As I wrote briefly in the LabView 2010, NI has developed a version of the "app store" where partners can write applications and sell them in an IP-protected store. This benefits the entire ecosystem.

In the product/technology keynotes, NI once again showed pushing the envelop on signal acquisition and analysis in a variety of ways and form factors. Later today I'll detail some new products. Co-founder and NI Fellow Jeff Kodosky discussed the complexities of programming time. Just shows the complexities of programming the "wires" that connect "virtual instruments" or "VIs" in a LabView programming environment. As NI works on these problems that "Jeff K" ponders, advances to LabView continue.

Exactly one year ago at NI Week I had learned that my blog publisher was going out of business and I had to change. So I've been on Squarespace full time for about 8 months now. So it's time to work on the site. It seems to be doing well.

NI Releases LabView 2010

In preparation for its annual user conference, NI Week, National Instruments today announced LabView 2010, the latest version of the graphical programming environment for design, test, measurement and control applications. The latest version offers new features such as off-the-shelf compiler technologies that execute code an average of 20 percent faster than previous versions and a comprehensive marketplace for evaluating and purchasing add-on toolkits for easily integrating custom functionality into the platform. For field-programmable gate array (FPGA) users, LabView 2010 delivers a new Intellectual Property (IP) Integration Node that makes it possible to integrate any third-party FPGA IP into LabView applications and is compatible with the Xilinx CORE Generator. National Instruments also implemented more than a dozen new features suggested by lead users through the LabView Idea Exchange, an online feedback forum that marks a significant new level of collaboration between NI R&D and customers.

The compiler abstracts tasks such as memory allocation and thread management. The compiler hierarchy has evolved over the lifetime of LabView to become smarter and more optimized. With LabView 2010, the compiler data flow intermediate representation has been further optimized, and Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM), an open source compiler infrastructure, has been added to the software’s compiler flow to accelerate code execution. National Instruments has conducted benchmarks ranging from real-world customer applications to low-level functions, and the new compiler delivers an average improvement of 20 percent across these benchmarks.

The LabView Add-On Developer Program establishes an online marketplace as part of the updated LabView Tools Network for developers to offer their free and paid toolkits and a comprehensive location for LabView users to browse, download, evaluate and purchase the add-ons. More than 50 add-ons from NI and third-party developers are available, including code reuse libraries, templates, UI controls and connectors to other software packages. Additionally, LabView users can use the VI Package Manager from JKI to connect directly to the LabView Tools Network from their desktop and manage add-on installations and updates.

Additionally, National Instruments has partnered with leading technology providers such as Xilinx to further open up the LabView environment. One example is the new IP Integration Node, which makes it possible for users to integrate any third-party FPGA IP into the LabView FPGA Module and offers direct compatibility with cores created with the Xilinx CORE Generator.

During the development of LabView 2010, NI R&D used the new LabView Idea Exchange on www.ni.com/ideas to solicit feature ideas from customers. In addition to submitting new ideas, customers can use the exchange to collaborate on suggestions submitted by others and vote on their favorite features. Fourteen popular submissions from the LabView Idea Exchange were implemented in LabView 2010 including many that improve code documentation and organization.