NI has recorded some great webinars on the subject of managing your LabVIEW based applications. These are broken down into 8 segments and cover the topics people are talking about right now:
Chapter 1: Organizing Files on Disk
Best practices and recommendations for how to setup file hierarchies on disk to prepare for large application development in LabVIEW.
Chapter 2: The Project Explorer
Learn how to migrate existing applications into the LabVIEW Project Explorer and use tools in the Project to setup your hierarchical structure.
Chapter 3: Cross-Linking Tools
Take advantage of tools integrated into the Project Explorer to prevent, detect and repair incorrectly linked LabVIEW code.
Chapter 6: VI Compare and Version Tracking
Take advantage of advanced functionality that source code control integration provides in order to track changes and perform graphical code differencing.
Chapter 7: Using the Project Library
Learn about advantages of using the Project Library, including how to modularize code and develop APIs for distribution amongst multiple developers.
Chapter 8: Deploying Applications
Use the Application Builder from within the Project Explorer in order to distribute end-use applications developed in LabVIEW.
To help commemorate the 10th anniversary of LEGO® Mindstorms®, Nevada Space Grant, the University of Nevada-Reno, National Instruments, The Energizer Battery Company, and the LEGO Mindstorms Team will be conducting the High Altitude LEGO Extravaganza.
H.A.L.E is an event that will carry up to 15 LEGO Mindstorms-based payloads into the Earth’s stratosphere. At that altitude H.A.L.E. will be above 99.9% of the atmosphere. They payloads will be exposed to extreme the cold and radiation of near space. The sky looks black and the curvature of the Earth is evident. Individuals and teams from all around the world are busy designing and building payloads for this historic event.
All payloads will be NXT and/or RCX controlled. Some teams will be flying cameras. Some will be flying scientific experiments. Most, importantly, every team will be having fun.
H.A.L.E. will take place in Reno, NV between July 28-August 2 (exact date to be announced and contingent on weather - check this website for updates as the date approaches).
The launch vehicle consists of an atmospheric weather balloon and a communication system to track the payloads. Once the balloon reaches approximately 30 km in altitude, it ruptures and the payloads return to the ground under parachute.
Projected minimum altitude: 27 km (88,000 feet)
Projected maximum altitude 33 km (108,000 feet)
Psst! Hey…, want to know how to get a discount to the upcoming NIWeek 2008 Worldwide Graphical System Design Conference and Exhibition? Give one or more presentations in an upcoming local LabVIEW user group meeting and you could get up to $1000 off of your registration price. Check out the details here.
From now until July 31st, when you give a presentation at any LabVIEW User Group meeting, you are eligible for a discount on your NIWeek 2008 registration.
How to participate: Contact the owner of your local LabVIEW User Group and request to give a presentation at the next User Group Meeting. The local user group owner determines the agenda with input on topics from attendees. Click here to find the LabVIEW User Group at your company or in your area. After presenting, send your presentation to Theresa Woodiel, (theresa.woodiel@ni.com) to receive your discount code to NIWeek 2008. Please include the date and location of the meeting where the presentation was given.
Number of Presentations Given:
1 = $250 off
2 = $500 off
3 = $750 off
4 = $1000 off
The big announcement this year at the FIRST robotics finals in Atlanta was the new robot controller from National Instruments. This new controller called cRIO runs a real-time OS and can be programmed using LabVIEW. The power of this new technology will open the door for new and more interesting challenges for future FIRST competitions.One area that is underdeveloped in the FRC category of the competition is the autonomous mode. This is in contrast to FLL which is mostly autonomous. Hopefully we will see some interesting games ahead.
In this video VI Shots interviews Ray Almgren who leads the worldwide academic relations program for National Instruments. We also interview several mentors and students to get their feedback on this change in direction for next years competition. Teams 2023, 1739, 47, 107 and 2053 are featured.
We were the first to blog about Slashbot back in March. Now, Slashbot is Internet famous after it was featured on Engadget. It now has 177K+ hits on Youtube. A record for any video featuring LabVIEW or NI technology. I like the fact that it uses solenoids to hit the guitar buttons. This means it could possibly be retrofitted to attach to a humanoid robot that holds the guitar. That would look kinda neat. I contacted Michael Voth and it seems that this demo will be making an appearance at NIWeek 2008. I promise to bring back a video interview of this cool project.
Boston Engineering decided to demonstrate their FlexStack product by attaching it to an iRobot Create programmable robot, have it scan RFID tags and then make it do several dances. FlexStack is powered by LabVIEW Embedded. Take a look at this original VI Shots video.
Apple.com/science has a feature page dedicated to LabVIEW! Not sure when this went up but it’s awesome. The main article focuses on the RoMeLa team who worked on DARwIn. VI Shots did a video last year on DARwIn. The article goes in depth on the power of LabVIEW but also focuses (of course) on the teams decision to switch from PCs to Macs:
“We started developing DARwIn in Windows,” says graduate student Sean Egger. “But you can port LabVIEW code from PCs to Macs and vice versa. Many of us had Macs and prefer Mac OS X to Windows, so we ported most of our DARwIn development software to the Mac version of LabVIEW. The Macs give us a stable operating system, and more importantly, a UNIX core, which makes things easier – such as TCP connections and serial port communication.”
“One of the reasons we really like LabVIEW is that it will connect so easily and seamlessly to any kind of sensor or motor controller. We don’t get bogged down writing drivers. LabVIEW’s got packages that communicate with just about anything we’ve thrown at it.”
Roving VI Shots corespondent and LAVA member Justin Goeres participated in the “buy one get one” program that the OLPC foundation announced last year. This is where you spend $400 and you donate one laptop to a child in an impoverished nation and in return you get one laptop for yourself.
I caught up with him and got his feedback on the unit. One thing I learned was that it ships with an application called TurtleDraw. This little app is great for teaching programming in a graphical way. If you’re thinking LabVIEW here, well, take a look and judge for yourself.
Another video taken at the FIRST final competition of 2008 in Atlanta. NI built a robot called NITRO to demonstrate the powerful capabilities of the new cRIO controller that will be used by the competition teams this year.
In addition to a cool ball shooting mode, NITRO has some advanced image analysis capabilities. Here we see it doing some pattern recognition and executing autonomous moves based on the image viewed.
What is not shown in the video is the ability to execute a specific move just by drawing a series of segmented lines in the provided dashboard application and then transmitting them to the bot. A huge improvement over last year.
The ability of the teams to take advantage of the power of LabVIEW graphical programming is really going to be an asset.
“Your robo-vacuum may be bumping into your feet in a malevolent attempt to kill you — or just trying to snuggle.”
So I just picked up the book by Daniel Wilson called “How to Survive a Robot Uprising”. Ya, I know, I’m several years late. Now I had an assumption going into this that the book was meant to be funny. Of course it was satisfying in that regard, but on the other hand I also learned about some of the latest advancements in robot technology. Most people only know about robots from what they see in movies. The reality is that robots operate within certain physical limitations based on, for example, what sensors they have or what information they have about their environment. This book helps educate the masses on the true capabilities of robots. I recommend this book if you like robots or just want to have a laugh about the topic. I also recommend this book for young kids. It sneaks in a lot of science while being a very easy read. Of course this book is littered with numerous life saving tips.
I’ve embedded a video of a talk Daniel gave to Google on the book. The video is a long 44mins. but gets pretty funny when the audience starts asking questions. Especially when Daniel talks about the glowing red light of the robots in the the movie I-Robot.
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