NIWeek 2010 Recommendations: How to compress 8 weeks into 3 days

If you were to attend all of the listed sessions (not even counting Keynote presentations, counting meetings with developers, time spent in the Expo hall, the Technology Theater, the conference parties, etc.) it would take you roughly eight work weeks to see them all. Of course your boss won’t let you come to Austin for two months to learn all this great stuff, so we have to compress it into three days.

Here’s some of my recommendations for specific sessions to see if you’re working on industrial and embedded control or monitoring applications. Of course this is just a short survey and there are lots more great sessions on the schedule. In a few cases I recommend more than one session in a time slot. I couldn't decide, so I will let you make your own choice.

Tuesday

TS3012-SW State Machine versus State Machine
Do you start all LabVIEW components with the producer-consumer design pattern, or do you use a full-featured state machine? Watch two Certified LabVIEW Architects face off over who has the best state machine and which features are essential for your template.
8/3/2010 (Tuesday), 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM Room 12B
Justin Goeres, JKI
Norman Kirchner, National Instruments
Nancy Hollenback, LabVIEW Instructor and Architect, The G Team

TS3521-IMC What's New with CompactRIO
Learn about the new hardware and software features for NI CompactRIO and how they can increase your design capabilities and efficiency.
8/3/2010 (Tuesday),01:00 PM - 02:00 PM Room 13 A/B
Arves Stolpe Product Manager, National Instruments

TS3301-IMC Best Practices for Designing Scalable Motion Control Applications on NI Real-Time Hardware Platforms
Learn how to realize motion control applications and deploy them to the hardware platform of your choice. Experience how the LabVIEW NI SoftMotion Module simplifies the design of multiaxis motion applications and see how you can use the same tools to integrate EtherCAT-based drives into your control application.
8/3/2010 (Tuesday), 04:45 PM - 05:45 PM Room 13 A/B
Christian Fritz, National Instruments
Marc Christenson, Systems Engineer, Sisu Devices

TS4140-ETS Wind Turbine Prognostics and Health Management
Health monitoring and predictive maintenance technology is essential for lowering wind turbine operating costs. However, reliable prognostic algorithms are challenging due to the dynamic conditions faced by wind turbines. Learn about health assessment analysis techniques for wind turbines including a multiregime approach to segmenting data.
8/3/2010 (Tuesday), 04:45 PM - 05:15 PM Room 16B
Jay Lee, Director of Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems, University of Cincinnati

Wednesday

TS4422-ETS Smart Grid and Renewable Energy Technology- Directions and Challenges
The National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) leads the way in developing clean energy technologies. Join Bill Kramer for an overview of instrumentation, test, control and monitoring projects at NREL. Get behind the scenes on smart grid power electronics, wind, solar and energy storage developments. Learn how you can apply your software and engineering skills to develop new products and systems in this exciting new technology area.
8/4/2010 (Wednesday), 10:30 AM - 11:00 AM Room 16B
Bill Kramer, Senior Research Engineer, National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL)

TS3260-IMC Using CompactRIO and LabVIEW for Online Signal Processing and Data Recording
Learn how you can perform online signal processing of "trapped" data records using LabVIEW FPGA and LabVIEW Real-Time for waveform acquisition, acquisition triggering, signal processing, and recording to TDMS files. See condition monitoring, prognostics, and motor current signature analysis examples.
8/4/2010 (Wednesday), 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM Room 13 A/B
Mike Grace, Machine Monitoring Business Development Manager, National Instruments
Preston Johnson, Sound and Vibration Segment Manager, National Instruments

TS3461-SW Completing Your Reconfigurable I/O (RIO) System with Custom Hardware: A Case Study Using NI Multisim
With Multisim, you can easily and quickly define custom circuitry to augment your current NI Single-Board RIO system. Using the new Circaflex daughter card from Cyth Systems as a case study, explore best practices in codesigning a biomedical embedded system with a printed circuit board (PCB) prototype using NI Single-Board RIO and Multisim.
8/3/2010 (Tuesday), 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM Room 12A
Bhavesh Mistry, Engineer, National Instruments

TS2992-TD Real-Time Structural Health Monitoring: The New Paradigm in Infrastructure Management
Through advances in the integration of sensors, digitizers, communication, and software, structural health monitoring (SHM) has become an effective tool for making accurate and timely remote evaluations of civil structures. Review the use of an SHM system developed using NI products that assists civil engineers in infrastructure damage detection and efficient emergency response.
8/4/2010 (Wednesday), 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM Room 14
Jon Keech, Digitexx Data Systems
Tino Mihajlovik, Digitexx Data Systems, Inc

TS3780-IMC Practical Application of a Reference Architecture for Local Machine Control
Explore the use of an enhanced NI reference architecture for local machine control to implement a process control system that performs a flush-and-fill process of a liquid-cooled computer. The system provides a basis for analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of using the reference architecture.
8/4/2010 (Wednesday), 02:15 PM - 03:15 PM Room 13
Stephen Masullo Engineer, PVI Systems Inc.
Nathan Lim PVI Systems, Inc.

TS3443-SW Best Practices for Memory Management and LabVIEW Code Optimization
Explore the internal workings of the LabVIEW execution engine, and learn how to use those principles to improve your performance and memory usage.
8/4/2010 (Wednesday), 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM Room 12A
Dan Hedges Engineer, National Instruments

TS3670-SW Developing Web-Based User Interfaces for Measurement and Automation Systems
Increasingly, engineers and scientists expect to monitor or control remote measurement and automation systems through Web browsers. Examine new NI tools for developing light-weight Web-based applications through graphical programming. These applications can be combined with LabVIEW RESTful Web services to provide powerful, flexible solutions for monitoring systems based on LabVIEW via the Web.
8/4/2010 (Wednesday), 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM Room 12B
Diya Mukherji, Engineer, National Instruments

TS3223-TD Synchronizing Scalable Sensor Measurement Systems
Learn how to build synchronized scalable data acquisition and sensor measurement systems on the PXI Express platform. Discover how recent innovations in hardware and software technologies simplify the synchronization of measurements across different sensor types using SC Express, DSA , and X Series devices. Also learn about different synchronization methods and the trade-offs associated with them.
8/4/2010 (Wednesday), 04:45 PM - 05:45 PM Room 14
Daniel Domene, National Instruments
Adam Dewhirst, Engineer, National Instruments

Thursday

TS3941-ED Architect Real-Time Systems with Confidence: Best Practices for LabVIEW Real-Time Development
How can you program your LabVIEW Real-Time applications for optimal performance, maximum reliability, and minimal jitter? Learn best practices for real-time design, development, and deployment.
8/5/2010 (Thursday), 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM Room 17A
Michael King Engineer, National Instruments

TS3037-SW LabVIEW Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) Design Patterns for Large Systems
LabVIEW object-oriented capabilities present new possibilities for large applications built on loosely coupled, event-driven components and frameworks. Find out how to reuse components across several applications by employing proven software engineering techniques such as inheritance, dynamic methods, dependency injection, and user events.
8/5/2010 (Thursday), 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM Room 12A
James Kring, CEO, JKI
Tomi Maila, JKI

TS3261-IMC Understand High-Speed DAQ with CompactRIO
View a high-speed waveform architecture for CompactRIO and learn how to integrate it with other CompactRIO devices performing measurements at different rates.
8/5/2010 (Thursday), 01:00 PM - 02:00 PM Room 15
Alan Armstead, Engineer, National Instruments
Jeff Tipps, Engineer, National Instruments

TS3289-IMC LabVIEW WSN Under the Hood
Explore the benefits and capabilities of programming wireless measurement nodes with the LabVIEW WSN Module Pioneer. Take a detailed look at the LabVIEW WSN execution model and how the embedded applications can perform custom analysis and decision making and improve battery life.
8/5/2010 (Thursday), 02:15 PM - 03:15 PM Room 15
Corby Bryan, Engineer, National Instruments

TS3449-ED The Right Development Process for LabVIEW FPGA Success
There are many wrong ways to approach LabVIEW FPGA design, which can create undesirable results. Learn the right process for successful designs in LabVIEW FPGA.
8/5/2010 (Thursday), 02:15 PM - 03:15 PM Room 19A
Daniel Eaton, Engineer, National Instruments

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If you happen to be around on Monday for Alliance Day, check out the technical session presented by the NI Systems Engineering group. Here's a shameless plug for my sessions on Monday.

AD4567 Interfacing CompactRIO with Third Party Devices
When developing applications with CompactRIO it is often necessary to communicate with sensors, controllers and other devices in the system. We will use three real-world solutions as teaching examples of how to approach development of a custom interface on CompactRIO: Siemens MPI, MySQL database, and SSI encoder.
8/2/2010 (Monday), 11:00 AM - 11:45 AM Room 15
Christian Loew, National Instruments

AD4569 Dynamic Configuration of CompactRIO I/O and Shared Variables
Using the LabVIEW Variable API on CompactRIO, develop components that dynamically discover and adapt to changes in I/O module configuration. This same API can be used to handle varying user-defined application needs with a configuration file. We will present different methods for the development of applications that provide these features.
8/2/2010 (Monday) 02:00 PM - 02:45 PM Room 15
Christian Loew, National Instruments

Unicode and LabVIEW

Ever wanted to build a LabVIEW application and localize it to many different languages? Maybe even change the language while the application is running?

You have probably been told that LabVIEW doesn't support Unicode. Well that is not quite true. While Unicode is not an official feature of LabVIEW, it is fairly well supported in an unofficial manner. I have collected some VIs and tips on using Unicode in LabVIEW and posted them on NI Community.

Please check them out and post your comments.

http://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-10153

LabVIEW OOP Singleton Reference Example

If you use LabVIEW classes in your application, examples, POCs, etc., you may have been wondering how to implement a singleton object.

What is a singleton? Singletons are known in the LabVIEW world as action engines, functional globals with methods, and under a few other names. Basically it is a set of data with associated functions, and you ever only one instance of this object in your application. A functional global (non-reentrant subVI), with uninitialized shift registers (USR)) to store the data and multiple cases to implement the different functions, is the most common example of a singleton in LabVIEW. Using OOP you can easily create a class which contains the same data and functions, however, by default a class will not limit the application to only one instance (object) of the class.

There recently was a good discussion on LAVA about singletons, including a good reference example of a singleton implemented as a LV class provided by LV R&D.

http://lavag.org/topic/11513-singleton-design-pattern/page__view__findpost__p__70428

One application of a singleton object may be a database interface in an application where many different components or other objects access the same database. Typically you only want one object or component touching the database to avoid conflicts, race conditions, etc. A database access class with a singleton object is a good solution for this type of application.