Next week I’ll be attending the software defined radio conference in Washington D.C. For those of you familiar with Virtual Instrumentation you know at NI we’ve been working for many years on software defined instruments that take advantage of PC based technologies. With a simplistic view of SDRs it isn’t difficult to draw a parallel between virtual instrumentation and SDRs. In the case of SDRs some of the communications system components traditionally implemented in hardware are defined in software (on a PC or embedded devices). With some of NI’s measurement class hardware and an IF transceiver you can develop an SDR and use LabVIEW FPGA to program the FPGA on the IF transceiver.
My goal at the conference is to learn more about the needs of people developing SDRs as they might apply to using LabVIEW and LabVIEW FPGA and also NI’s FPGA based hardware. If you’re going to be at the SDR conference next week and would like to get together with ideas on how to apply LabVIEW to SDR development or how to make use of FPGA based COTS solutions from NI for SDRs let me know. You can find me on twitter @kamrans or just e-mail me directly at kamran dot shah at ni dot com
For some reason this NI Gives campaign happens to coincide with a number of non-profit projects for me. Last weekend was the Board Retreat for Green Doors, we’ve seen tremendous growth in both our board and services over the last year and it was a good opportunity to revisit our strategic plans and get alignment on what to focus on in 2010. The end of last week I was also involved in kicking off a new non-profit, Team Rogue. This non-profit is focused on a number of things, one is developing an Austin based elite running team to compete at the National, World and Olympic stage. The elite runners will also be actively engaged in the Austin community to engage middle-school and high-school students. I’ll write more on this soon, I’m travelling for work so it’s a little harder to keep up.
This time of year with the NI Gives campaign I’m remind of one of the things I enjoy about the work environment at NI. We don’t just pay lip service to encouraging volunteerism and philanthropy. A large number of NI engineers volunteer in local schools, helping teachers and students learn science and engineering concepts with Lego Mindstorms. This is actively encouraged and when I talk to engineers that take part in the program it’s obvious to see the benefit that they also get from the experience.
For over six years I’ve been on the volunteer board of a local non-profit, Green Doors, that provides affordable housing to formerly homeless vets and to at risk single parent families and NI has been great in allowing me to remain active with Green Doors. These all sound like small things but they do add up and I’m grateful that NI supports these efforts of its employees, here are three things I’ve benefited from:
Once a month I leave work early for our board meeting, it’s on my calendar and it’s a time that people don’t get upset about (very busy people with titles much cooler than mine) that time being off limits. Every other week I come in later one day for a meeting with our executive director.
Corporate matching yearly of up to $1000 of personal donations and willingness to contribute pro bono work
Flexibility … things come up, sometimes during regular work hours and as long as it’s reasonable I’ve always found my managers to be accommodating to me needing to out for a couple of hours during the day
It seemed difficult at first 6 years ago working crazy hours to make time to volunteer but once it beacme part of the routine it hasn’t been as daunting as it once seemed. It really does help that the culture at NI encourages us to find workable solutions that balance our work and personal lives.
This week is the second week of three of the NI Gives campaign. This is the annual charitable giving campaign and like many other companies we’re in the season of giving. Last years campaign fell at about the same time of the year, right after all the bad financial news had come out and even with that it was a record year in charitable contributions at NI which was a really great thing to see. As part of the campaign today and tomorrow during lunch a number of local non-profits are setting booths up in our cafeteria during lunch to expose the different volunteer opportunities available in Austin and also to present themselves as organizations to consider to donate to.
Charity isn’t just about giving money. Don’t get me wrong, being part of the board of a non-profit I know the value of unrestricted funds (funds that aren’t tied to a specific use) as they provide the most flexible form of money, which can be used where an organization needs it. If money is tight being able to volunteer your time, cleaning up, landscaping, painting a house, teaching somebody to read or use a computer are all extremely valuable. In many ways they are more fulfilling because of the personal interaction and direct benefit you see with those you’re serving. I hope many of us at NI are able to make the time to drop by and see some of the organizations that are visiting us to get an idea of how we can get involved in our community.
This weekend marked a milestone for the team working on the Web LabVIEW UI Builder that we previewed at NI-Week earlier this year.
We’ve been able to provide access to the application to a limited number of pioneer users. With the pioneer program you get very early access to the software, where your feedback can help direct the product’s direction at a point in development where we have much greater flexibility to redefine feature priorities and revisit design and architecture decisions. The other thing it means is I can start blogging about one of the projects I’ve been involved with and hopefully find a reason to post much more often.
We do keep access limited to people who have expertise and specific use cases the UI Builder can be applied to. With pioneer early access programs it’s also important that we engage a number of people the engineering team can actively engage, and whose feedback we have the bandwidth to handle. Over time as things are refined further and the more coarse grained issues are addressed we’re able to work with more and more people. So if you aren’t accepted into the program immediate please be patient with us. The best way to really get involved in the feedback process is apply for the Web LabVIEW UI Builder pioneer program. If you’re interested please let us know or e-mail me directly (kamran.shah at ni.com) and we’ll get in touch with you.
Over the next couple of months I’ll post here on some of the things we’re trying that are different in the Web LabVIEW UI Builder (as it currently works) from LabVIEW that many of you probably used to. An example is trying to let you create VIs that are purely functions (no UI), think of a sub-VI that doesn’t have to have a user interface with controls or indicators. Architecturally we’re trying to allow that with the Web LabVIEW UI Builder, that does mean there are some differences in the relationship of the connector pane to terminals/controls/indicators. I’m sure it sounds confusing right now, I’ll make sure I post some screenshots and video’s and look forward to your comments. As I said, we’re in a pioneer mode with the UI builder so things aren’t set in stone.
During NI-Week I posted about two of the projects I’ve involved with, the Web LabVIEW UI Builder and the LabVIEW System Designer. The video’s of both of the preview demo’s were posted and you can view them now.
If you are interested in getting early access to either of these two projects, to provide feedback as a customer on the usability and features please visit this page to inquire about becoming a lead user (ni.com/day2).
During this morning’s NI-Week keynote we previewed a new LabVIEW tool to create thin client UIs. By preview, it isn’t avaialble for you to use today. If you make use of web services to share data from LabVIEW applications on Windows or Real-Time (RT) targets (PXI or cRIO) you will be able to make use of the Web LabVIEW UI Builder to create zero install thin client UIs to monitor and update the data with web services. The editor will be accessible through a browser and doesn’t require you to install something on your machine, well except for the Siliverlight plug-in. The editor and your final application are Silverlight applications.
The image below shows you the UI created using the Web LabVIEW UI Builder that was shown today during the keynote as well as editor hosted in a browser.
Screenshot of Web LabVIEW UI Builder from NI-Week 2009 Keynote
The Web LabVIEW UI Builder has the LabVIEW graphical programming paradigm but there are some differences with how you use LabVIEW today. These exist to provide true thin client editing and execution and of course to also for us to try some new things out in a supporting tool without changing your daily existing experience with LabVIEW. I’ll write more on these in blog posts after NI-Week and ask you to chime in on your impressions.
The best way to really get involved in the feedback process is apply for the Web LabVIEW UI Builder pioneer program. If you’re interested please let us know since we’re actively selecting people to join the pioneer program. As part of the pioneer program you’ll get early access to the software when it’s ready and interact with the product manager, program manager and engineers to help shape the product’s features.
This morning during the NI-Week keynote we previewed the LabVIEW System Designer. The LabVIEW System Designer introduces a System Diagram that lets you graphically design systems that integrate I/O, communication between devices and targets and multi-rate signal processing algorithms.
In communications signal processing, especially on FPGAs, many algorithms are multi-rate and must function in a streaming manner. There are three areas the LabVIEW System Designer focuses on:
Multi-rate DSP algorithms on an FPGA targets
Communication between multiple computing targets, including Windows hosts, Real-Time Processors and FPGAs
Graphical configuration, management and visualization of hardware and I/O resources
Below is a diagram of an HDTV receiver and the image of the System Diagram created with the LabVIEW System Designer from this mornings Keynote. You can see a number of targets, communication of data between them as well as the VIs performing demodulation as well as MPEG decoding.
HDTV Receiver Diagram
LabVIEW System Designer Implementation
I’ll write more on each of the focus areas of the LabVIEW System Designer once NI-Week is over, if a specific area is of more or less interest please let me know so I can focus my future posts better. You can see a video of what we showed last year, I’ll post a link to this years video once it’s ready.
If you think you’d benefit from these features please let us know, we’re actively selecting people to join the pioneer program. As part of the pioneer program you’ll get early access to the software when it’s ready and interact with the product manager, program manager and engineers to help shape the product’s features. This is a critical phase where user feedback can help refocus our efforts in a broad sense or refine some key usability issues.
It’s on the web-site even if it isn’t “official”. LabVIEW 2009 is coming to a computer near you. Features include code sharing with VI Snippets, saving even more time with partial diagram clean-up and the updated icon editor and some power features like VI recursion and and partitioning for loops across cores. Enjoy the new version and let us know what you think about it.
Also, you may notice the name of the new release is the year of the release, LabVIEW “2009″. Does that mean you should expect another one next year at this same time? I’d wager you should.
You know how easy it is to take text code from a web page and just copy and paste it into your application and use it. It would be really nice to do that with a graphical code in LabVIEW. Check out the VI Snippet
Posted by Kamran 
Posted by Kamran 
Posted by Kamran 
