Embedded design refined
NATIONAL Instruments is at the forefront of revolutionising embedded design: “We will do for embedded design what the PC did for the desktop.”
This prognostication was delivered by James Truchard, National Instruments president and CEO, in the opening keynote address at NIWeek 06, held in Austin, Texas last month.
The worldwide instrumentation conference occurred over three days.
“The challenge in 1986, when LabView 1.0 was released, was basic connectivity,” Truchard told the 2100-strong audience. “Now we’re seeing a lot of interest in bridging design and test with graphical system design. We can bridge that gap in this software world.”
He added, “Virtual instrumentation revolutionised industry by combining hardware and software integrated with drivers – software seen as acquire-analyse-present and hardware as bits versus frequency.”
Truchard predicts that programmable automation controllers (PACs) will ultimately replace three kinds of technologies: single-board computers, PLCs and custom designs.
NI used the occasion of NIWeek 06 to launch LabView 8.20, the 20th anniversary edition of the LabView graphical system design platform for control, test and embedded system development.
“LabView does for test and measurement what the spreadsheet did for financial analysis,” said Truchard. “With graphical system design, we can expand virtual instrumentation into complex instrumentation like complex RF and digital instrumentation and distributed instrumentation systems.”
The LabView development platform for the next 30 years is firmly embedded in graphical system design, which includes interactive designing, prototyping (tight I/O integration) and deployment. “It’s the same LabView we’ve known for the past 20 years, expanding and growing to serve these expanding spaces,” said Truchard.
He foresees a new combination of software and hardware, the so-called “next generation of programming”, which includes multiple models of computation and asynchronous and heterogeneous multiprocessing.
Truchard notes that programming languages typically have life spans of some 50 years and, hence, that by that definition LabView still has some 30 years to travel.
First released in 1986, LabView challenged traditional approaches to programming with graphical development similar to flowcharting. Since then, LabView has evolved from a desktop tool for instrument control and data acquisition into an integrated design, control and test platform for desktop, industrial, embedded and handheld applications.
Development years total over 1500, with over 400,000 users.
Conference content
NIWEEK featured 210 technical sessions including hands-on workshops, case studies, user applications and panel discussions from companies such as Boeing, GM Powertrain and Intel. Four technical summits were held: on graphical system design, vision, RF and wireless communications, and sound and vibration. Visitors attended from 57 countries.
Conquering summits
THE world is becoming more intelligent with embedded systems in almost every device, including consumer electronics and time-critical systems. However, as manufacturers push harder to reach markets faster than before, design cycles are being increasingly compressed.
The summit on graphical system design thus focused on streamlining embedded development, using high-level graphical tools and flexible hardware for prototyping and development. Here, timing and concurrency are essential, as are actor-oriented languages.
A key thread in the wireless summit focused on ever-increasing new features in systems demanding tremendous processing capabilities, despite limited energy budgets. There was also significant commentary on how remarkable progress in submicron VSLI technology during the past two decades has helped engineers and academicians to explore innovative digital and analogue signal processing techniques.
Topics at the sound and vibration summit focused on dynamic measurement hardware, as well as on how infotronics-based machine degradation monitoring and embedded prognostics technologies enable machines and systems to achieve near-zero breakdown performance.
The vision summit covered the latest camera standards, image acquisition strategies and automated industrial imaging systems. In this fast-growing industry, while continued improvements to low-cost vision systems have helped to detect and measure a growing list of attributes in the industrial environment, a great deal of scepticism still exists. The development of new metrics for automatically assessing the quality of digital images and videos was also discussed. Such development has great significance for image and video delivery, image and video processing algorithm analysis, and automated inspection.
More new products, developments
APART from releasing LabView 8.20, NI also introduced its fastest PXI digitiser/PC-based oscilloscope as well as the industry’s first DAQ modules for PXI Express and a new integrated PXI chassis and controller.
At the same time, the new Lego Mindstorms NXT robotics toolset was announced.
Mindstorms NXT, the next generation of the Lego robotics invention system, became available last month and includes a new programming environment, custom-developed by NI and powered by LabView and the Mindstorms NXT hardware platform. This joint development between NI and Lego Company provides programming software for K-12 students to build and program robots.
With the toolkit, LabView users can create and download VIs to operate and control the Mindstorms NXT platform. Third-party software and hardware developers also can use the toolkit to create native blocks for Mindstorms NXT software.
23-Aug-2006