Last month, on August 23rd, DMC played host to the Chicago LabVIEW Users Group. Over 40 attendees from the Chicagoland area traveled to DMC to participate in the event. The Chicago LabVIEW Users Community is a great way for members of the local NI technology community to network with other users, and gain insights on new applications and technologies being applied to industry.
As this event was very closely coupled to the completion of NI Week, DMC hosts: Darren Jones, Eric West, and Danny Budzinski offered their insights on their trip to NI’s headquarters in Austin, TX, and the new technologies we can expect to see in our 2012-2013 development cycle.
Eric began with a detailed description of the new features in LabVIEW 2012, offering an overview of a number of productivity improvements that streamline developers’ interactions with source code. Eric also outlined usability enhancements to the Welcome Screen, including a look at the reorganization of template code, designed to assist new users in getting started with versatile, powerful, and scalable designs.
Darren continued the overview of NI Week exploring more of the new hardware offerings we can expect to see from National Instruments. He outlined a few key new products including the stand-alone (Windows-based) Compact DAQ, as well as the latest in FPGA and RF marriages, the Vector Signal Transceiver (or VST).
Danny closed the session on NI week with a discussion on some of the technical session offerings in the Austin area including: .NET WPF, cRIO Security, Actor Framework, Software Engineering Practices, Continuous Integration, and more. Overall the team offered invaluable insight into NI Week 2012, and assisted the Chicagoland LabVIEW Users in getting up to speed on the latest from National Instruments.
The theme selected for the technical component of the User’s Group meeting was TDMS data management. DMC team members prepared a presentation outlining from beginner to advanced methods for integrating TDMS into acquisition based applications. Surrounding the discussion of the file format, DMC developed a series of exercises designed to demonstrate the speed and file efficiency of the TDMS platform. The exercises were designed to plug into a racing game. Attendees were tasked with breaking into various groups, each group entering a character in the race. Upon completion of each exercise, users could see the performance of their code head to head. While the race may not be perfect (due to hardware differences, and network limitations), it did well to provide users a tangible example of some of the file features TDMS offers to enhance large data applications.
The Users’ Group meeting closed with a social reception on DMC’s rooftop deck. Snacks and refreshments were served as users spent time socializing and networking with other members in the Chicagoland area. A few competitive games of bean bags, and great conversation rounded out the evening. All in all Chicagoland LabVIEW Users spent quality time with their peers learning more about new NI offerings, the on-goings at NI Week 2012, and the benefits of TDMS platform. We look forward to hosting a LabVIEW Users’ Group again in the future.
Learn more about joining the Chicago LabVIEW User Group Community.
