VI Shots

A video from NIWeek 2008. Benjamin Cook really had fun building this electric guitar effects system based around NI hardware and LabVIEW.

This is a wireless audio processing project. A 550 MHz transmitter transmits FM modulated data to a 5600 down converter. It down converts the data to 25MHz. That gets sent to a 5640R IF-RIO card. The IF-RIO card has an FPGA. That’s where all the demodulation and audio processing happens which then gets sent out the sound card. You get very low latency audio response.

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.

Resources:

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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:

• Infinity Project
• NI Speedy-33
• HiTechnic
• LabVIEW
• Lego

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”.

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There’s been some activity over the past year or so where people have been trying to create automated machines to solve the Rubik’s cube. At NIWeek 2007 which took place this past August, I had the chance to interview an applications engineer from National Instruments who described the system they put together to achieve this goal. As you can see from this video, the process is very involved. It requires imaging of the faces, processing the solution and executing the moves to produce the final completed cube. The hardware is expensive, the mechanics problematic and in the end, the demo fails to do the job. On the other hand, it’s a cool way to spend some time with some motion control hardware.Most of the time, the best solution to something is the one that is the simplest. Take a look at this Rubik’s cube automated solution that uses Mindstorms NXT. I am scared to see the budget difference between the two implementations. Daniele Benedettelli’s website provides more insight into how this was done. As you can see, the main problem of how to grip and rotate the side has been solved by using a socket type construction that wraps around all the cubes. This way, the stress of rotation is evenly distributed.