This video highlights the new Compact RIO hardware that will be used as the controller for the 2009 FIRST robotics competition in the FRC category.
National Instruments had a booth close to the pits at the 2008 FRC final championship in Atlanta. They built several robots demonstrating the capabilities of the new controller. One of the robots is shown here and the various components of the control hardware are explained.
The FlexStack product is a 2.5 inch, rugged platform that takes advantage of the flexibility of LabVIEW Embedded with the power of the Analog Devices Blackfin Processor.
Out of the many submissions to the NIWeek 2008 demo contest, this year we have yet another console game meets LabVIEW. Texas A&M students: Dave Buckner, Mitchell Jefferis, Vinny LaPenna, and Michael Voth are working on Slashbot.
From their blog:
To put it simply, we are designing a robot that is capable of autonomously playing a video game, the wildly popular Guitar Hero series. In the game a player attempts to simulate playing songs as color-coded buttons corresponding to notes scroll on the screen. A sensing and computation system will analyze the NTSC video signal as it is output from a PlayStation2 gaming system. The buttons a player is asked to press will be detected and an appropriate control signal will be sent to the robot. The robot will consist of six solenoid actuators, one for each colored button and one for the “strum” bar.
National Instruments continuously works closely with Lego to expand virtual instrumentation into the classroom by developing LabVIEW integration with their Mindstorms NXT platform. In this latest VI Shots video we see a demo of an NI product acquired from Hyperception, the Speedy-33. We see how the Speedy-33 combined with a HiTechnic interface can integrate LabVIEW signal processing algorithms to move an NXT based on audio frequencies.
National Instruments had a very small booth at Macworld Expo this year. They were there nonetheless and I asked them a few questions about the current state of LabVIEW on the Mac. I also wanted to find out how, and if, a current Windows user like myself could use a Mac exclusively and still manage to satisfy Windows based LabVIEW project clients. According to Mike Neil, LabVIEW product manager, you can have your cake, er… Mac and eat it too. With the use of virtual machines (vmware fusion, parallels) or bootcamp (which boots the whole machine into Windows), you can now run your windows development environment on a Mac and satisfy any Windows project requirements. Which leaves me asking myself, why am I still on a PC?
Are you working with LabVIEW on the Mac? Tell us about your experiences in the comments.
Stephen Litt, a systems design engineering student from the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) shows us how he and three other students replaced a vehicle ECU with a CompactRIO module running LabVIEW Real-Time. What started as a fourth year design project has now turned into a start-up company called WaterlooSPEED. The team documents their efforts on their blog, and in this post, describe how they have the system controllable via a PDA! Now that’s cool.
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.
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.
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.
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