NI Days are here again

National Instruments ’ annual seminar series, NIDays, this year kicked off in Singapore in February before going on to a further four locations: Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, and Bangkok. Now a well established event on the regional calendar, NIDays is an opportunity to fi nd out all about the company’s latest solutions for test, control and design applications, through presentations, demonstrations, and lablearning sessions.

First up and introducing the event in Singapore was the familiar figure of Chandran Nair, Managing Director, NI Southeast Asia. Having been at the regional helm for a number of years now, it was good to see that his enthusiasm for the company and its products remains as highly charged as ever. Using the example of Apple’s new iPhone, he explained that increasing feature integration and complexity of devices requires commensurate development in test and measurement systems.

Flying in from Texas to make the keynote speech was Eric Starkloff, Director of Test Marketing. Graphical System Design, said Starkloff, extends LabVIEW out from its traditional test focus and allows engineers to design, prototype, and deploy embedded systems quickly. On hand to demonstrate the GSD concept was NI Applications Engineer Sanka Ravipriya, showing off a fully functional printer designed and controlled with NI hardware and software.

A comprehensive array of more in-depth technical sessions covered a wide array of NI solutions and application examples, including data acquisition, power quality, vision systems, embedded signal processing, and the new features within LabVIEW 8.20. And in the exhibit booths, there was a chance to get up close and personal with industry partners and end-users displaying solutions built with NI equipment; Wind River, Quantel, Xilinx, Calistra Research Labs, Ryobi Geotechnique, and ST Kinetics being among them.