Tuesday, November 15 is our next meeting. Call for presentations.

[FabiolaDelaCueva]

Hi LAF members,

I decided to take a page from the CSLUG user group ran by Steve Watts in the UK. He starts the discussion on topics for the next meeting as soon as the last meeting ends. Let's see how this works out.

I will post in the comments the presentations we had already volunteers for. We will decide which presentations to give based on the number of likes.

Feel free to add your own presentation, include Presenter Name, Title and Description.

Also, add a topic you would like to hear more about and then maybe others volunteer to talk about it.

And as Allen Smith mentioned during the last meeting, a very valid topic is:  Open discussion regarding topic x, where there is not really a single presenter and we handle it as a group discussion.

Thanks,

Fab

[FabiolaDelaCueva]

Presenter: Aaron Gelfand

Description:  implementing (dynamic) variable length array manipulation in LabVIEW FPGA.

[FabiolaDelaCueva]

Presenter: Allen Smith

Title: Unfunded Liabilities:  How Poor Package Design Drives Technical Debt, and What You Can Do About It

Description: As software applications grow in size and complexity, they require a larger unit of organization than the VI, class, or library.  Organizing our software into packages is important to long term success, but package design is an oft-overlooked aspect of system development in the LabVIEW community.  The result can be an application that is increasingly resistant to change, or even prematurely obsolete.  Come to this session to learn the principles of good package design, and some metrics and tools you can use to guide your own development.

[FabiolaDelaCueva]

Presenter: Fabiola De la Cueva

Title: Improving Code Quality and Team Efficiency

Description: Five tips that can ensure happier, more productive developers, from ways to create APIs that are easy to use and troubleshoot to productivity tools that can automate repetitive tasks. Improving the developer experience leads to better code quality and team efficiency, code that is easier to troubleshoot, and developers who meet their deadlines with joy.

[Aaron_G]

Here's a better description:

Averaging data can take many forms, for a project, I was requested to implement a time weighted average to smooth data spikes. The time weighting formula could be adjusted to a user specified value (# of averages), and also had to account for situations in which older data did not yet exist. FPGA code requires data to be fixed in length. Although not successfully implemented in FPGA during the project (had to move it up to the RT layer), this presentation will show how I was eventually able to implement the code in the FPGA, and some of the changes made to make it scaleable for a large number of channels while using minimal FPGA resources.

[ShadesOfGray]

Presenter: Damien Gray

Title: Data Modeling using Objects

Description: The various minimization and fitting VIs included in LabVIEW were written a long time ago (late 90s?). Some include options to dynamically call a function, others do not. Most have a fixed set of starting conditions that do not give you the flexibility you need when modeling things like third order surfaces or highly nonlinear functions. A bit of copy / paste into an object-based model solves most of these problems, and allows you the flexibility needed to successfully model something complex. I have completed basic functionality (Nelder-Mead and Conjugate Gradient minimizers with arbitrary functions) and currently use these methods for modelling complex physical systems. There will be examples!

[Chris_Cilino]

Presenter: Chris Cilino

Title: Automating Build Processes for Source Based on VIPM

Description: The process of moving from "Code and Fix" to professional software development usually entails continuous integration of some sort. At Cirrus Logic, we are in the middle of that evolution. To take us to the next level, I've designed a prototype build system that automates the creation of VIPs from libraries of code that are hierarchical in nature. I intend on publishing this system to the community at some point in the future and will design it to be extensible so that other distributions, such as exes, dlls, llbs, can be created.

[DrewPierce]

Awesome Chris(!), can't wait to see what you've created. -drew

[FabiolaDelaCueva]

Ping to everyone who has not voted or not volunteered yet to present in our meeting on November 15.

We will use the number of "likes" on each topic to decide what are going to be the presentations for our next LAF meeting.

We will be making a final decision by October 31st.

Thanks,

Fab

[Aaron_G]

Artemis and Daiy Mae beg you to vote for Dynamic Array Size Manipulation in LabVIEW FPGA. They have been waiting for me to present this since 2013.