Ideas flow at NI Week 2010

By Rich Krajewski from EE Times

AUSTIN, Texas -- National Instruments held its annual graphical system design conference here this week and customarily featured its newest version of LabView. This time NI is using 14 ideas suggested by its customers to include in the latest LabView 2010 version.

NI researchers implemented the new features suggested by lead users through the company’s LabVIEW Idea Exchange, an online feedback forum that marks a significant new level of collaboration between NI R&D and customers.

“We introduced the NI Idea Exchange last year, and during the course of the year we had thousands of ideas as in the product feedback forum where our R&D engineers and users work together to submit ideas, collaborate on their development, and vote for the ones they like best,” said John Graff, vice president of marketing at NI.

In addition, LabVIEW 2010 code executes an average of 20 percent faster via a low-level virtual machine software complier. The open source compiler enabling the speedup has also been adopted by Apple, Adobe and Google.

Other software update releases came from NI’s partners.

For example, Symbio, a certified National Instruments alliance partner, has released the latest version of its Goop (Graphical Object Oriented Development) at NI Week 2010.

Symbio's Goop development suite 4 is the only Unified Modeling Language (UML) tool built in and integrated with NI’s LabVIEW.

According to NI, Suite 4 enables LabVIEW users to fully extend the capabilities of the built-in object-oriented programming features of the LabVIEW graphical system design platform.

"Symbio's in-depth understanding of LabVIEW has enabled them to deliver an extremely powerful tool for LabVIEW users that require UML documentation," said Francis Griffiths, vice president of European sales for National Instruments. "Symbio's suite 4 makes it easy for users to document both small and large-scale design projects quickly as well as apply object-oriented programming practices to their LabVIEW applications."

In his keynote on NI Week day 2 company co-founder Jeff Kodosky, NI Business and Technology Fellow and inventor of LabView in 1986, remarked that NI is researching a system-level approach to graphical system design, one ”whose code is not dependent on WAIT statements, but specified by a deadline”.

“All that matters is that one agrees that the timing of end points such as a sensor and an actuator are defined in a system-level code.” Kodosky said that NI researchers are exploring the good, the bad, and the ugly of such synchronous languages as Esterel, where timing clicks in a circuit are defined by PAUSE, instead of WAIT; Giotti with its task execution timeline; and PTIDES, a Berkeley programming language where “events” not “data” specify how activities need to occur.

“We need a realistic representation of timing, and we are progressing toward that as we move to the system-level approach in LabVIEW.”

On the exhibit floor, Intel, National Instruments and Cyth Systems showed off  “Rockbot”, a robotic application that uses Intel Core 2 Quad processor running four processes on an NI PXi controller module. The controller controls a robot that plays an open source version of popular video game called Frets on Fire that imitates the commercial game Guitar Hero. In the video game players use the keyboard to play along with markers which appear on screen, and with the aim to score points, achieve a high point multiplier to complete a song. Here the song is completed by the robot in a most precise manner.

To accomplish the task each Intel processor core is virtualized with NI’s real-time hypervisor with core 1 running machine vision; core 2  runs the image analysis algorithm, core 3 the control output loop to the actuators on the robot and core 4 running the game under Windows XP.  Rockbot is used to show that an application with multi-core and virtualized embedded devices can share the same platform with a high level of determinism and isolation between task partitions.

NI Week 2010 has attracted more than 3,000 engineers, scientists, and educators, August 3-5.