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You know Christmas is over and Chinese New Year is on the way when the invitations roll in to attend NIDays, National Instruments’ annual, day-long technology fair. This year saw the event taking place in five Southeast Asian locations: Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Manila, and Bangkok.
As usual, the tour kicked off in Singapore, but this time in a brand new location, as the Biopolis made way for the luxury St Regis Hotel. However, although the commercial bustle of Orchard Road was a distinct contrast to the quiet lanes of the Biopolis research hub, the event stayed true to its roots in offering its target audience of engineers hands-on labs and in-depth technical sessions from NI staff plus application stories from evidently satisfied end users of NI’s test, control and design solutions.
Mazimizing multi-core
On the product front, the main development since NIDays 2007 has been the launch of LabVIEW 8.5, which was designed to make maximum use of increasingly prevalent multi-core, parallel processing hardware architectures.
Compared to traditional text-based environments, the graphical nature of LabVIEW greatly simplifies the task of programming multiple threads, said Chandran Nair, Managing Director, ASEAN, in his opening keynote, The Parallel Shift.
With version 8.5, designers of embedded and industrial control systems can load balance tasks across multiple cores without sacrificing determinism. And users can manually assign portions of code to specific processor cores to fine-tune real-time systems or isolate time-critical sections of code on a dedicated core.
Rapid results
Success story highlights in the Application Track included hard disk drive spindle motor spindle motor testing using NI DAQ; automation of biofuel diesel production using LabVIEW and Compact Fieldpoint; offset printing alignment using Compact Vision System and Vision Builder; and the use of NI technology in a FSAE (Formula Society of Automotive Engineers) race car.
The latter session was particularly well attended and received, as Associate Professor Seah Kar Heng of NUS (National University of Singapore) explained how a fully functioning race car is built by scratch by senior engineering students, tested, and then transported to the US to take part in the prestigious FSAE inter-varsity competition. LabVIEW forms a central part of the data logging system for track-side monitoring of key parameters like oil pressure, rpm, temperature, and wheel speed.
A number of novel displays were also on show in the demonstration area, all illustrating the various uses to which NI hardware and LabVIEW can be applied: an automated Rubik’s cube solver; a safety helmet crash tester; an RFID tag tester; and for all those anxious to practice their Zouk and Ministry of Sound moves, a dance simulation game.
NI Southeast Asia chief Chandran Nair
