VI Shots

Mark Balla is a very active member of the LabVIEW community and contributes his valuable time to the LAVA forums. He developed an Icon editor replacement for LabVIEW, is currently a member of the Code Repository review team and is an organizer for the LAVA Coding Challenges. I spent a few minutes at NIWeek this year to talk to him about LAVA and why LabVIEW community involvement is important to him.

• Link to Quicktime Video version

Mike Kleinigger is currently a sophomore at RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) pursuing a dual degree in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering. In this video He discusses the MOT-V (Medium Object Transport Vehicle) at NIWeek 2007. Unlike the Segway style vehicle, the MOT-V always tries to keep it’s position vertical as oppose to moving forward.We were surprised to see a unicyle which also uses a control system for stabilization.

From: LimitlessBoredom

I modified the game of life program to output the screen XY to an analog card so it can be viewed on an ocilloscope.

In this video interview we have Amanda Emnett from the University of Tulsa give us a tour of the vehicle her team worked on for the Challenge X competition. The “brain” of the vehicle control system is powered by a Compact RIO Real-Time FPGA system that was programmed with LabVIEW.Challenge X is a three year national competition that started in 2004. It’s sponsored by General Motors and the US Department of Energy. The objective is to take a GM Chevy Equinox and modify the vehicle to minimize emissions and consumption, without sacrificing utility and performance. Now in its final year, the focus is on delivering a “showroom” vehicle that addresses the requirements of consumers.

• YouTube page with more videos on the car.
• Nice AutoChannel video covering Challenge X.

VIA Make:

I wanted to let you know about something we feel is a pretty significant open source milestone. Namely that we were able to help get TI to release a free compiler for their c54x DSP. It’s especially significant considering they have a big profitable division turning out these proprietary, expensive tools.

As you know, TI’s silicon has often been coveted for its combination of high performance, low power consumption as well as low cost. TI’s silicon powers something like 55% of the world market for cell phones, so any steps they make towards opening devices and allowing independent developers to contribute has a lot of potential significance. Previously, the cost of the tools has been a big impediment for open source hackers. This development would essentially move the cost of developing for some of their devices from $5-10K to $200, obviously well within the range of many makers obviously. As these devices become more powerful and PC like, the concept of “open” devices is becoming more realistic by the day.

The original announcement is  from the neuros website. Neuros makes a digital audio video recorder for the home. This announcement from TI will help them get open source codecs running on the DSP of the Neuros OSD device.

There are several interviews on GIZMODO with Bug Labs CEO Peter Semmelhack. I encourage you to watch them all. I envisioned hackers running around hacking ATM machines with these things. I also liked the reference to home automation: “a central brain talking to a distributed network of sensors”. Of course stand-alone DAQ modules come to mind. It would be cool if NI made DAQ modules that plugged into this thing. Gee, this whole thing just might work…

Videos:

• Open souce hardware and software.
• Interchangeability demo
• Concept interview

We the Robots is a new comic strip about a robot nation by cartoonist Chris Harding. I love it!

Quote:

Early focus-group testing among Chris Harding’s retarded friends has revealed a bit of confusion about the simple, three-word title: “WE THE ROBOTS.”

To clarify…
CORRECT: “We The Robots“
INCORRECT: “We Are The Robots” or “We Are Robots”

The comic is not named after the lyric by Kraftwerk. (though we are huge fans)

An easy way to remember it:
“WE THE ROBOTS,” as in “WE THE PEOPLE…” from the preamble to the United States Constitution. Why? Because this comic strip is about a nation of robots… and the URL was available.

(note: Despite this reference, We The Robots is NOT to be taken as social or political commentary. It is purely fictional. It is about robots– not people. Please do not write us angry letters disagreeing with the point of view of these make-believe characters… who do not even exist!)

In this video taken at NIWeek 2007, we interview Rick Francis who is one of the TestStand developers. The only reason this demo is cool is because of the HO sized slot cars. Each car is a “device under test”.

Bug Labs is betting on the fact that you want to build your own custom gadget instead of buying a slick polished device that just works out of the box. I understand the market for it but how big is it? The “styling” is kind of boxy. Of course it comes in Apple white, but once you start assembling your blocks, I’m sure you wouldn’t be caught dead in public with this thing. Ok, the geek in me agrees on one thing. It’s freakin’ cool. The only question I have is: when can you run LabVIEW on it!?

Quote from their site:

BUG is a collection of easy-to-use, open source hardware modules, each capable of producing one or more Web services. These modules snap together physically and the services connect together logically to enable users to easily build, program and share innovative devices and applications. With BUG, we don’t define the final products – you do.

From looking at the specs of the hardware it seems like they’ve thought of everything. The BUGbase is powered by an ARM microprocessor, (isn’t everything?) runs Linux, has built-in WiFi, USB, ethernet, LCD display and has four sockets that accept other accessories. The current announced list of accessories:

• GPS
• Digital Camera / Videocam
• Touch-sensitive, Color LCD Screen
• Accelerometer, Motion Sensor (eyebrows raising)

On the software side of things it appears that the company is counting on a large community cult-like following. It’s planning to roll out BUGnet which will allow collaboration and sharing of BUG applications.

Again, from their site:

BUG is built entirely with open source software. BMI, the BUG Module Interface, attaches devices to the BUG. Device-based services and applications are dynamically available based on which modules are connected to the BUG. Higher up the stack is Java, which hosts a service-oriented component runtime called OSGi. Java and OSGi make creating new BUG applications simple and intuitive, as BUG applications are essentially one or more bundles. In addition, each BUG module launches an OSGi bundle which in turn creates services for other components to consume. BUG applications are created using the BUG SDK (internally named Dragonfly), and are shared with other developers and users through BUGnet, our online community.

Some future accessories:

• Touch-sensitive, Color LCD – 2X
• Mini-QWERTY Keyboard
• Teleporter (WTF?)
• Audio Speaker, Input/Output Mini Jacks

As to what you can build with this thing? Bug labs offers an example:

You can easily assemble and program a GPS + digital camera device that automatically publishes geo-tagged photos as a web service. Integrating with an online photo-sharing service like Flickr is only a few more lines of code away, and now you have your own real-time, connected traffic-enabled mobile Webcam!

Well, it would be pretty cool to see someone hack this and manage to run LabVIEW embedded on it. But i’m not so sure this is possible. One thing that I need to get over though, is the fact that it’s called a BUGbase. Bug and software don’t go well together.

A pic of the internals (attrib: pt):

More:

• Video on GIZMODO

Quicktime
Jay Kinzie is an avid Lego Mindstorms fan, he contributes to the NXT STEP blog and is a participant in FLL competitions. He is also a MINDSTORM Community Partner (MCP). Jay showed us some of his creations at NIWeek 2007 this past August.

Jay is also a freshman mechanical engineering student at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Jay caught the entrepreneurial spirit at 15 years old and has formed Jbotics Innovations LLC (www.jbotics.com) to leverage his ideas related to internal combustion engines and transmission designs. He currently is pursuing 41 patents on a variety of products. Some of his transmission designs are built into his Lego robots.

• Jay’s creations on the LOGO site.