Tag Archive for ‘labview’ at VI Shots

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Slashbot: The Guitar Hero Robot using LabVIEW and FPGA

Published by Michael Aivaliotis on March 30, 2008 in NIWeek 2008 and labview. 1 Comment

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.

Resources mentioned:

New Funny LabVIEW related videos on Youtube

Published by Michael Aivaliotis on March 21, 2008 in Funny and labview. 0 Comments

Someone at NI just put up a slew of funny LabVIEW related videos on Youtube. I assume these are interns. Check them out below.

PS: Can you spot the Dr. T cameo?

Expanding Mindstorms NXT with LabVIEW

Published by Michael Aivaliotis on February 4, 2008 in Robo Development 2007, labview and mindstorms nxt. 0 Comments

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.

Resources mentioned in Video:

LabVIEW on the Mac is alive and well - Macworld Expo 2008

Published by Michael Aivaliotis on January 24, 2008 in Macworld Expo 2008 and labview. 6 Comments

Quicktime Version

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.

LabVIEW replaces vehicle ECU - University of Waterloo

Published by Michael Aivaliotis on December 13, 2007 in NIWeek 2007, embedded and labview. 0 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.

LabVIEW powers MOT-V and Unicycle

Published by Michael Aivaliotis on November 24, 2007 in NIWeek 2007. 3 Comments

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.

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, NIWeek 2007 and labview. 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.

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

Chris Anderson hates graphical programming

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

Chris Anderson at NIWeek So 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.

LabVIEW helps Virginia Tech team win third place in DARPA Urban Challenge

Published by Michael Aivaliotis on November 10, 2007 in Autonomous Vehicles. 0 Comments

It’s great to see LabVIEW once again at the forefront of autonomous robotics. This time with an impressive finish by Virginia Tech team Victor Tango and their vehicle named Odin.

Virginia Tech, along with TORC Technologies, won the $500,000 third place prize last weekend at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Urban Challenge. In a close race with teams from Carnegie Mellon and Stanford universities, the Virginia Tech team used National Instruments LabVIEW software and CompactRIO hardware in its vehicle. Virginia Tech’s team, Victor Tango, was one of only six robotic teams to finish the 55-mile DARPA Urban Challenge course.

“National Instruments congratulates team Victor Tango on its remarkable achievement,” said Ray Almgren, NI vice president of academic relations. “Team Victor Tango is a great example of how domain experts, rather than computer scientists, use NI LabVIEW graphical system design to quickly design, prototype and deploy sophisticated robotic designs. NI is proud to offer technologies for applications in this exciting and growing field of mobile robotics.”

As part of the competition, TORC Technologies created a set of LabVIEW tools for Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems (JAUS), an autonomous ground vehicle standard for passing messages and status information between various vehicle subsystems. LabVIEW running on a separate Microsoft Windows Server performed image processing and path planning. The team integrated an NI touch panel with the vehicle dashboard to select appropriate modes of operation.

“This exceptional team of Virginia Tech graduate and undergraduate students has been a true joy to work with, as they share the same passion for robotics as TORC,” said Michael Fleming, president of TORC Technologies. “With LabVIEW, the team implemented parallel processing of high-end vision algorithms running on two quad-core servers that perform the primary perception in our vehicle. The ability of LabVIEW to automatically multithread our application, in addition to the optimizations we performed in the language itself, drastically reduced our development time.”