An "Engineers" Take

Accessing Ettus USRP hardware in LabVIEW

Kamran — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 20:56:34 +0000

We recently posted a pre-release version of a driver that allows you to use LabVIEW to interface with Ettus Research USRP hardware. This is an important milestone on the way to full support of Ettus Research hardware in LabVIEW. We’re looking for people that will be part of our early access program for the driver, to help provide feedback and also guide our priorities for Software Define Radi0 (SDR). If you are interested please visit the page, try out the driver and share your feedback on the site: http://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-14531

Try it out and let me know what you think

Kamran — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 22:59:57 +0000

It’s been an interesting week for Silverlight given the coverage and interpretation of Bob Muglia’s comments on HTML 5 at the Microsoft PDC and the subsequent re-framing from Bob Muglia and also Scott Guthrie. So hot on the heals of all the Silverlight/HTML5 hoopla we’re releasing the LabVIEW Web UI Builder, a Silverlight based graphical programming editor that creates Silverlight user interfaces! It’ll be “officially” released on Monday but is live today. You can see some previews of the types of applications you can create here and on the UI Builder page.

Heartrate Rate Monitor Sample

Windmill Monitor Simulation Sample

You can try the UI Builder out today, I really do mean today, since it’s a web hosted development environment. You can try its full functionality using your browser, even store your files on-line, for …. well as long as you want to for now. I know our teams would love to hear your feedback so feel free to comment on this post or use the feedback link in the product itself. Now that the UI Builder t is ready for use I hope to be able to post more about what our teams have been working on, and also try to comment on some of the challenges we faced developing the UI Builder and some of the trade-offs we’ve made.

Features in Silverlight 4 that are useful for the LabVIEW Web UI Builder

Kamran — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 02:01:15 +0000

Siliverlight 4 has a few features Chris highlighted during the Silverlight 4 launch keynote that I wanted to expand on as well as a few others that he didn’t demo that we’re trying out. We may not make use of all of them in the LabVIEW UI Builder but they do present some interesting possibilities. One features I wanted to write about today is the Out of Browser feature and ability to run trusted applications. The Web UI Builder is browser hosted and we have gotten some requests for is to be able to install the application locally. With the Out of Browser feature people could connect to the server, “install” the application on their machine (including desktop and start menu shortcuts) and be able to develop off-line.

The other feature related to running out of browser is “trusted applications”. One of the nice things with Siliverlight is the security it brings with sandboxing. This does however mean saving files to the hard drive in locations like the My Documents folder isn’t possible. With Siliverlight 3 this means that files are saved to what ends up being some obscure location on the hard-drive that you really can’t control. With Siliverlight 4 by giving permissions to an application like the UI Builder to run as a trusted application you can save to your local drive in your My Documents folder more freely. This let you logically organize any projects you create with the UI Builder and also to zip a directory up and share it with others.

Tagged: LabVIEW, Silverlight, UI Builder

A more recent look at the LabVIEW Web UI Builder

Kamran — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 16:42:11 +0000

The LabVIEW Web UI Builder was demo-ed yesterday in the Microsoft keynote announcing Silverlight 4. Chris Cifra is one of the architects on the team and presented the UI Builder to a non crowd. You can see the video here. The NI demo starts at 1 hour, 47 minutes.

Tagged: LabVIEW

Join me at the software defined radio conference in D.C. next week

Kamran — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 20:01:27 +0000

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

Tagged: FPGA, LabVIEW, software define radio

The last week of the NI Gives campaign coincides with a new non-profit for me

Kamran — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 07:33:29 +0000

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.

Tagged: NI Gives

An environment that encourages community giving

Kamran — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:08:01 +0000

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.

Tagged: NI Gives

NI Gives, the NI Charitable Giving Campaign

Kamran — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:00:51 +0000

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.

Tagged: NI Gives

Web LabVIEW UI Builder … you can try it now, kind of

Kamran — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:29:27 +0000

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.

Tagged: Web LabVIEW UI Builder

Videos of the Web LabVIEW UI Builder and LabVIEW System Designer

Kamran — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 17:55:13 +0000

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).

Tagged: System Designer, Web LabVIEW UI Builder