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NI Kicks off NIWeek 2009 with Out-of-the-Ordinary Product Demos
Products targeted at motor control apps showcased
Karen Field, Editor-in-Chief -- Design News, August 4, 2009
Using props like Mr. Potato Head, a blade-wielding, pick-and-place robot and a studded bat used by Samurai warriors, the keynote address kicking off NIWeek 2009 today lived up to its expectations by featuring a lineup of completely out-of-the-ordinary product demonstrations. The goal was to show engineers at this major user conference not just some of the new products and features that NI is rolling out, but also to expose them to different ways of thinking about how they use NI products in the design and development process.
Judging from the audience reaction, NI met that goal.
Keynote host John Graff, vice president of marketing and customer operations, kicked things off by referencing the recent mortgage, banking and the economic crisis. "The financial engineers have screwed things up, and now it's time for the real engineers and scientists – the drivers of innovation – to step up and fix things." The audience roared with approval at his remarks.
NI engineers and product managers then proceeded to show how design engineers can save time, money and complexity in the design process.
Mr. Potato Head played the leading role in a demo of NI's new X Series Multifunction DAQ, a family of 16 new devices for PCI Express and PXI Express, which should be of interest to engineers incorporating motor control into their applications.
By providing improvements in onboard timing, data streaming and triggering, one powerful capability of the new devices is the ability to perform measurement tasks in parallel. The new ASIC technology provides four 100-MHz counters per device. With each counter now able to generate a finite pulse train, it eliminates the need for two counters per measurement – one to continuously generate pulses and a second to gate the pulses for applications such as stepper motors.
To showcase the tool's
multifunction capabilities, Software Group Manager Daniel Domene dreamed up a
3-D scanning application that "goes way beyond basic analog input." With Mr.
Potato Head mounted on a rotating platform, the output from a laser distance
sensor and motor encoder are used to measure the rotation at an actual angle. A
counter is used to move the laser up to scan Mr. Potato Head, layer by layer.
"This would have taken three X Series devices to accomplish in the past," says
Domene.
Given the tool's multifunction capabilities, Domene says the demo was
ridiculously easy to set up. "Every time I had a roadblock, I could simply
re-engineer the system in about 25 clicks. That's a big benefit of
hardware-in-the-loop. To do it in software would have required a big, crazy
mass of code."
In another demo, dubbed "The Flying Plate of Amputation," Systems Engineer Mac Christenson and Product Manager Christian Fritz showcased the new NI CompactRIO controller and backplane. "Multi-axis motion can be intensive," says Christenson. "The loops must be tightly synchronized to provide smooth motion."
For the demo, which consisted of a blade-wielding, five-axis pick-and-place robot, engineers interfaced NI's C Series drive interface module for servo and stepper drives directly to the CompactRIO. The benefit, they say, is it "allows engineers to use the same VI for motion functions to develop a prototype. It allows them to develop, visualize and deploy motion applications."
VP John Graff declined to use his hand to demo the robot's precise positioning capabilities (a glove was substituted instead), but he happily cranked up the speed to make the point.
And as for the Japanese Kanobo – a bat-like weapon of solid oak clad with iron studs? In a demonstration of NI's CompactDAQ, a USB data acquisition tool and LabVIEW Datafinder Toolkit, Graff's strike force (3,000 Newtons) was recorded and compared on-the-fly to thousands of files of data for other top warriors. John was advised not to get into any bar fights.
NIWeek 2009 continues through Thursday, August 6 with interactive technical sessions, hands-on workshops and an expo.
Software Group Manager Daniel Domene showcased the capabilities of NI's X-series MultiFunction with a 3-D scanning application starring Mr. Potato Head.
