ArchivePage 6 of 7

LabVIEW management happy make

Published
by
Michael Aivaliotis
on November 22, 2007
in LabVIEW
. 0 Comments

From: Warning: Life Under Construction

Ahh, pressure. Enough heat and pressure makes a dirty, soft lump of coal into a shiny, hard diamond. I don’t know about shiny but I do believe that I became more valuable when the pressure for a replacement test system hit my ‘to-do’ list on Tuesday. Just so there is no misunderstanding, the big boys that I work for are reasonable. They wanted everything running in just a few days and without spending any money. Lucky me. And I’m not saying that because it’s National Sarcasm Month. I really mean, “Lucky Me!” If the powers-that-be had not had a moment of weakness a few months ago and spent $4500 on a programming system called LabVIEW, I would not have been able to save their bacon from the fire this week. So instead of taking me about two to three weeks to write a new program, I was able to create it in 16 hours! The hardware end still took almost 40 hours to build. Of course, in order to not spend any of their retirement money on much needed equipment, I had to rob parts from another major project project. But that will be a crisis for another day. For now, it’s all good. In three and a half days, I had production running again by this morning, with much quicker test time too. Once upper management learned that money was flowing into back into their yearly bonus, life was good.

LabVIEW powers University of Tulsa Challenge X vehicle

Published
by
Michael Aivaliotis
on November 21, 2007
in Challenge X, LabVIEW and NIWeek 2007
. 0 Comments

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.

Free open DSP Compiler Available from TI

Published
by
Michael Aivaliotis
on November 20, 2007
in embedded
. 1 Comment

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.

New Bug Labs interviews

Published
by
Michael Aivaliotis
on November 19, 2007
in Gadget
. 1 Comment

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:

We the Robots

Published
by
Michael Aivaliotis
on November 19, 2007
in Robotics and cartoons
. 0 Comments

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!)

TestStand does HO

Published
by
Michael Aivaliotis
on November 19, 2007
in NIWeek 2007 and teststand
. 0 Comments

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 - The long tail of gadgets?

Published
by
Michael Aivaliotis
on November 16, 2007
in Gadget
. 0 Comments

Bug Labs collection.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):

Bug Labs internals

More:

Jay Kinzie - Lego Mindstorms NXT MCP

Published
by
Michael Aivaliotis
on November 14, 2007
in mindstorms nxt
. 1 Comment


Quicktime

Jay Kinzie - Lego Mindstorms NXT innovator 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.

Chris Anderson hates graphical programming

Published
by
Michael Aivaliotis
on November 12, 2007
in mindstorms nxt
. 3 Comments

Chris Anderson at NIWeekSo Chris Anderson the Editor-in-chief of Wired magazine did the final keynote presentation at NIWeek 2007 this past August. I was really excited about this since up to the run up to NIWeek I had managed to purchase and read his book, The Long Tail. I was also eager to get him to sign it, which I managed to do.

Chris did an amazing job in the keynote of describing his involvement with the LEGO Mindstorms NXT robotics system and how he created a UAV which was controlled by the NXT. This is marketing gold for LEGO and an inspiration to all, young and old as to what can be accomplished with a few low cost LEGO parts and a cell phone. He mentioned how his 9 year old son programmed the NXT using the NXT-G graphical programming language (which we all know is really LabVIEW in disguise).

I left that keynote feeling happy and all geeked out because, hey, when it really comes down to it, the Editor-in-chief of Wired magazine is using LabVIEW! How cool is that?

Well, not so cool it turns out. Chris just posted on his geekdad blog that Robot C is “The Best Programming Language for Lego Mindstorms” I mean, c’mon Chris, really? Can you seriously tell us that a 9 year old kid will jump for joy when you show her a screen full of this? Give me a break. I’m beginning to wonder if you’ve turned from a geek dad to simply a geek. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that this intended for kids. No, really it is. The biggest challenge we have as parents is to find ways to pull our children away from various mind numbing distractions onto something useful. Showing them pages of C code is not one of them.

In this video my 8 year old son built and programmed the NXT claw on his own. I mentioned to him that he was programming in LabVIEW and he was surprised. He was surprise because he thought LabVIEW was this complicated software that only dad knew how to use and was for automating complicated machinery he knew nothing of. This is the whole point. He was able to build the mechanics and write the automation program without writing one line of code.

The future is not C or text based programming languages. The future is graphical programming. Chris mentions several times that it’s time to use a “real programming language”. I agree. This is why we should all be programming the NXT using LabVIEW. See, LabVIEW is a real programming language and contains all the things that Chris misses in NXT-G. LabVIEW has “if…then…else”, “while”, even “for…next”. It also has sophisticated debugging tools. Can it rise up to the challenge? Well, if Virginia Tech uses it for DARwIn and the DARPA challenge then I’m sure it will work on the poor little NXT brain. Oh, and if the cost is too high, there’s always LabVIEW Student Edition.

Edit: LAVA has picked up the discussion here.

New LEGO NXT project website, answers question: “Where do I go from here?”

Published
by
Michael Aivaliotis
on November 12, 2007
in mindstorms nxt
. 2 Comments

I just got wind of this cool NXT website through one of the FLL group lists I’m subscribed to, nxtprograms.com.

nxtprograms.com

Dave Parker, the founder of nxtprograms.com says about his new site:

I started this web site in response to feedback that I have heard over and over from parents of kids at our school: They got an NXT set for Christmas, had fun building the one or two sample robots, and now they are having trouble figuring out what to do with it, either due to lack of building experience (especially with the studless NXT style parts), lack of knowledge of any programming, or simply a lack of ideas that are fun but simple enough to do. Lack of programming knowledge, in particular, is a big barrier to most kids and severely limits what you can do with your NXT set. I have also found that most kids don’t have the patience to learn any programming lesson-style during their free time, so this site takes a different approach. There are no programming lessons, but instead there are a variety of free, fully commented sample programs that go along with various fun projects that the kids can simply download and use as it, then perhaps some will be motivated to learn more about how they work by studying the programs. Those of us who have studied any programming know that many times the best way to learn it is by seeing concrete examples. In addition, by following the building instructions for the projects, the kids will also learn various ways of building with the NXT parts.

I have to agree that figuring out where to go next after you have built the included bots is a challenge. My favorite part about the site is the super crisp detailed pictures of the assembly process. All programs are included on the site for free. As an added bonus, at the end of the project page there is a challenges section that gives you ideas on how to expand the project.