Welcome to the NI page on element14. Let's Engineer Ambitiously.
I'm super excited to announce that we are working with NI systems and integration partners to launch a series of technology focused webinars. Our first webinar is with Aliaro, who will provide key insights in to BMS testing.
The event is now officially launched and will be live on (UTC), sign up here:
Battery Management Systems: Testing and Simulation Explained
More dates to follow!
Please be gentle, this is my first post!
As part of my role within Farnell, I should have been more active on this community but I haven't as yet. Moving forward, I'm aiming to bring updates from both NI and Farnell including events, promotions, new product launches and more. As a starting point, here are some of the activities that I should have been shouting about...
Authorised Training Partner - Farnell UK
To start off, for the LabVIEW users out there, Farnell is an Authorised Training Partner. What does this means? If you're in need official NI training you no longer need to join virtual sessions or self teach. Come join us in our Leeds office on one of the dates below to be taught by a real, in person instructor. The team over at Control Software Solutions are on-board to provide instructors for all of our dates from their team of NI Certified Professional Instructors.
Nestled in that list are also certification exam dates! Same location, but because we will invigilate the exam, there is no need to jump through all of the hoops of the virtual examination delivered over the last few years. If your CLD, CLA, CTD, CTA, etc certification has lapsed and the thought of resitting remotely is putting you off, reach out and we can get you signed up.
ATP Certification Exams:
LabVIEW User Groups
Farnell is proud to support the engineering community, and as part of that we are supporting LabVIEW User Groups in the UK. These are local events, organised by engineers, for engineers. Each event typically has 3 or 4 speakers providing insightful talks based on something they've learned, best practices, new toolchains, etc. It's also a great place to hear from NI with updates on software roadmaps, releases, etc.
Following on from a strong start in January at the NWLUG, the rest of the year currently looks like this:
If I've missed any, let me know and I'll add them in and more details to be confirmed throughout the year too. Reach out to be included in the contact list for more information!
GDevCon
Following on from LabVIEW User Groups, GDevCon returns to the UK this September! GDevCon#6 is in Brighton from 9th to 11th September! This event is independently run and provides (probably) the best forum for all things graphical programming. Organised by leaders in the LabVIEW
community, GDevCon is focused on delivering world-class graphical programming material covering a wide spread of topics relevant to today’s discerning developer.
NI Days
NI are bringing NI Days back to Europe!
So far this post has been UK centric, sorry about that. NI Days however, is a Europe wide series of events, where you can meet peers and key contacts within Farnell and NI to ensure you get the best support moving forward. Farnell will be attending all NIDays events in 2025 so sign up and stop by our stand to meet your local NI BDM! Events below with some details to follow:
Edit: Fixed some formatting and added images... everything looks better with pictures.
I heard about this job after we ran a roadtest on NI's Thermocouple Measurement Kit. I'm passing it on:
Who They're Looking For
What You'll Do
What You Need
How to Apply
My Take
If you are at all interested, I'd take the time to apply. My personal interactions with NI have always been positive. I've found them easy to work with. And their products have received good reviews. My feeling is test engineering is on a growth path, so it's an area that one should see career growth. Good luck.
Overview
Choosing the right technology for your design validation testing, automated system testing, and mechanical test pays off in time to market and total cost of test. Here are seven reasons CompactDAQ should be one of those technologies.
Flexible Hardware
Your products change. Even when they don’t, customers are going to ask you to test something “off the menu.” How easy is it to add a power measurement to validate battery life, add more thermocouples to track component heat production, or upgrade to high-speed inputs to catch operating state transitions? Build your test system on CompactDAQ and use any of the more than 100 measurement modules to meet your test requirements now and in the future.
FIGURE 1. Use the over 100 modules for CompactDAQ to meet your sensor and signal requirements now, and in the future when they change.
Flexible Software
The best software in the world doesn’t matter if your team can’t use it. NI has one of the best selections of software support on the market. Choose to develop with LabVIEW, Python, MathWorks MATLAB® software, C, C+, C#, VB 6.0, .NET, or choose not to program at all and use NI’s FlexLogger configuration-based data acquisition software. Want more choice? Call DLLs or scripts from LabVIEW. Use Python scripts to automate FlexLogger projects. Reuse your existing code and adjust the software to your team, instead of having to adjust your team to the software.
FIGURE 2. Choosing the right software tool becomes less of an issue because you can integrate your existing code for analysis, communication, or data formatting into LabVIEW.
Synchronization
Things happen fast on complex designs. What is the pressure difference as the valve opens to 50 percent? What is the flow rate when the pump is at 60 RPM? What is the current draw on the motor at maximum torque? You need synchronized measurements. CompactDAQ chassis with Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) technology synchronize all measurement modules in the chassis and between connected chassis, so test and design teams can link cause to effect, faster.
FIGURE 3. CompactDAQ chassis with TSN synchronization use the Ethernet cable for communication and synchronization. Run test software from a connected PC, or from a CompactRIO system with DAQmx compatibility (as seen in image)
A Brand Known for Reliability
Datasheets don’t mean much without brand quality. Have confidence you’ll get the data you need when you need it. NI instrumentation is built with more than 40 years of experience in test and measurement so you can Engineer Ambitiously.
FIGURE 4. NI has worked with test engineers for decades and blind surveys show our brand is associated with overall satisfaction.
Automation for System Testing
Life-cycle tests, battery drain tests, repetitive system tests: these should happen while you’re at lunch or overnight while you’re sleeping. Automate them! Use analog and digital output modules to modify controller setpoints or simply turn things off and on. Using a PLC for some of this today? Pick a chassis with a built-in controller that runs a Linux-based RTOS so you can add an extra layer of reliability.
FIGURE 5. Use CompactDAQ’ s flexible software options and hardware output channels to build a fully automated test system for tests such as temperature ramp-and-soak in thermal chambers as seen in the image above.
Ruggedness
Functional testing environments aren’t always clean, air-conditioned spaces. Be confident your test system will survive real-world conditions with -40 to 70 ºC, 50 g shock, and 5 g vibration operating specifications.
FIGURE 6. Rugged shock, vibration, and temperature specs let you install CompactDAQ close to your DUT for shorter signal wires and a faster setup experience.
Size/Portability
Take CompactDAQ hardware with you so you have the data you need to make decisions. Use the 1-slot USB-powered chassis with a laptop for walk-around measurements and test your designs on the proving grounds or your real-life test bed. Build a Pelican-case style system and take it to a customer installation to see what they see—or just ship it to them. Either way, shorten the back-and-forth and focus on engineering a fix. This is portability without sacrificing capability: a 256-channel system fits into a space the size of a small suitcase.
FIGURE 7. Build CompactDAQ into a portable case to validate systems on site with customers or in real-world testbeds.
Next Steps
Save time building your next test system with the Design Validation Test System Build Guide for CompactDAQ
MATLAB® is a registered trademark of The MathWorks, Inc. Other product and company names listed are trademarks or trade names of their respective companies.
Whether you are testing power management ICs or RF power amplifiers, taking quality DC measurements is a cornerstone of testing semiconductor chips. Improve measurement accuracy and product quality by applying these foundational best practices.
Click here to read more and get access to technical white paper.
This surprise was definitely not expected by anybody in the audience of GDevCon#2: NI announced LabVIEW Community Edition! This new, free version of LabVIEW is for noncommercial, nonacademic use.
Eric Reffett, the LabVIEW and LabVIEW NXG planning lead, literally went the extra mile(s) by traveling to the UK to announce the new NI product offering and answer questions.
As part of its commitment to empowering the LabVIEW community, NI revealed this huge news at a community event instead of an NI conference. As a board member of GDevCon Limited, I was excited that NI chose GDevCon#2, an independent conference open to all graphical developers, to unveil its LabVIEW Community Edition.
LabVIEW Community Edition features all the functionality of LabVIEW Professional Edition, including the ability to help you build and deploy executables. Most importantly, it is completely free and does not have any watermarks on it. In a nutshell:
Yes, but you must use it only for noncommercial and nonacademic projects. According to the NI End User License Agreement (EULA), “If you have acquired a license to LabVIEW Community Edition or LabVIEW NXG Community Edition, you may use the Software solely for your personal, noncommercial, nonindustrial purposes. You may not use the Software for teaching or research at a degree-granting educational institution.” Using LabVIEW Community Edition at a place of business or to create test systems, exe's, toolkits, and so on that you intend to make money from would not be consistent with the permissions of the EULA. Similarly, students, educators, and researchers would break the EULA if they used LabVIEW Community Edition to work on coursework or research for an academic institution. Users must purchase a license for commercial and academic use cases. LabVIEW Community Edition’s licensing policies are the same as NI‘s current licensing policies.
LabVIEW Community Edition is for anybody not pursuing commercial goals but wanting to get creative using a graphical programming language. For example, you can work on a private project on your PC at home and then take it to work to commercialise it using your commercially licensed copy of LabVIEW. Potential use cases include:
LabVIEW Community Edition also allows students and academics to install and use LabVIEW in situations that their academic site licenses don’t cover. They can install it on their PCs and use it at home.
To ensure this edition of LabVIEW works well for hobbyists, NI updated the LINX Toolkit for supporting hobbyist hardware targets like BeagleBone, Raspberry Pi, and Arduino and bundled it with LabVIEW Community Edition. The toolkit is part of the community edition‘s platform release.
More importantly, the no-commercial-projects limitation for the LINX toolkit has been removed, so you can tinker around with your hobby projects using LabVIEW Community Edition at home and then take your work to the office to industrialize and commercialize your hobby projects with a commercially licensed version of LabVIEW.
NI will release a beta version of LabVIEW Community Edition in November of this year, at the same time as LabVIEW 2019 SP1, through the Technology Preview Program (all normal disclaimers regarding software timelines apply). NI’s first full release of LabVIEW Community Edition is scheduled for May 2020.
A beta version of the LINX Toolkit is available now on the Tech Preview, but the first full release is also scheduled for May 2020. You can learn more by viewing NI’s Software Technology Preview website.
In case you’re wondering, though the Technology Preview Program requests a valid SN with an active SSP contract, this is not required for the LabVIEW Community Edition Beta.
Edit November 13: The Beta of LabVIEW Community Edition is now available at ni.com/beta!
Saying that I’m excited about this doesn’t do my emotional state any justice at all. I’m thrilled! I do believe that NI’s bold step might finally give LabVIEW the chance it deserves to grow its user base on a really large scale.
It’s obvious that giving software away for free lowers the entry barrier for those tinkerers, students, and hobbyists who are already in love with LabVIEW but who do not already own an appropriate license for it.
The LabVIEW ecosystem will benefit greatly from this strategic move—probably way more than from anything else ever done in that regard. The effects that I hope this will have on growing the community go way beyond the obvious increase in LabVIEW users. Growing the user base will make the community a better place for all of us. We will see more tools, not only from NI and the LabVIEW community but also from third parties who will take greater interest in our expanding graphical programming world. Eventually, we might see all sorts of tools pop up supporting LabVIEW and the G language—tools that other, text-based languages have been leveraging for years.
As an entrepreneur, I expect to benefit from the growing number of potential customers. But even more, I hope to see more people use LabVIEW—or at least be fairly familiar with it—which eventually enlarges our pool of potential employees. How great is that?
Finally, take a few minutes and let NI know how you will leverage LabVIEW Community Edition by taking this short poll: http://bit.ly/LabVIEWCommunityPoll
