LabVIEW
LabVIEW in Industry
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Lots of production and/or development tests are made through LV. E.g. Ericsson, Electrolux, SCA, Volvo cars, Volvo trucks to mention a few.
/Y
Railroad black boxes - also tested with LabVIEW. Lockheed Martin uses LabVIEW to test a lot of their space-level products, as well as critical military equipment. (But then, some of them are still tested with HP-BASIC, so go figure.)
My list is not as exhaustive as Jeff's, but still...
- With TestStand used to test the avionics for the Delta, Atlas, and Ares rockets
- UI for manually testing command receivers for the Delta rocket on the pad (I got to walk underneath a Delta II while installing one of these test racks)
- Data processing of flight data for jet engines (one of those cases where no hardware interface is involved with LabVIEW, just pure software)
- Control system for testing how a jet engine handles icing while in flight
- Control system for making sure a jet engine's "Jesus Nut" is properly installed (multi-million dollars lost due to this test failure, which is why I was brought in)
- Control system for making sure a car's radiator was properly crimped (accelerometer used to detect cracking)
- With TestStand to test RF amplifiers (saved the company weeks of testing time with one small test and with more data)
- Testing of medication injectors to be used at hospitals (specifically the MRI and CAT Scan rooms)
- Condition monitoring of power generators to detect shorts and allow for the power company to schedule a down time instead of having an emergency shutdown (which is VERY expensive)
That is probably all I am allowed to talk about. I am now doing some testing of some really cool stuff.
There is also an NI ad floating around youtube where they point to almost everything somebody uses on a daily basis and mention that it was tested with LabVIEW code.
I process a lot of stuff for the Aerospace industry using LabVIEW. Don't smoke in an airplane lavatory, or the cargo bay, or the electronics bay... Lots of sensors on aircraft & ground vehicles. Lots of LabVIEWs everywhere.
@JÞB wrote:
So, getting in a automobile? Yup, lots of those parts have been tested with LabVIEW.
Let me expand on this a bit just because I feel this one-liner just isn't enough. Engineering and building a car is extremely complicated. Down to every screw, wire, bolt, and piece of plastic. Every thing is engineered designed, tested and built to some specification that the OEM puts out. Modern cars have about 100 ECUs alone. These are mini embedded computers running dedicated tasks talking to each other. And I'd guess at least 80 of the 100 ECUs in a car, have LabVIEW involved in some form or another in their development or test cycle. There are of course other things that need to be tested but I'm going to focus on these for now.
Sometimes this is engineering testing to perform some rapid prototype to see that the ECU responds to some request to do something. This is usually a bench, a power supply, random wires spliced in, and cheap NI hardware just to prove the thing does what it should.
But as the system grows you put equipment in a rack, create a test sequence, or some debug mode to exercise the hardware. And then then carry that over into DV, and PV testing to qualify the part performing long term testing to ensure the part holds up to environmental, concerns. Or maybe you do some hardware in the loop testing, where the entire vehicle is simulated and the ECU now believes it is in the vehicle. Some equipment requires more hardware to simulate the vehicle like a dyno controlled setup in a test cell. Then there is also electromagnetic compatibility testing (EMC) that does weird things with electrical noise around the ECU to ensure it doesn't go through resets or crash. This ECU, Dyno, HIL, ED, DV, and PV testers are made with LabVIEW. Then if you really want to get special you carry all this software developed over into the end of line tester that tests each part as it is built before shipping them to the assembly plant.
I've worked in or near the automotive industry for 10 years, and I've worked with several testing houses, OEMs, and suppliers, and they all know Vector, and NI. The next most commonly found standards probably focus around DSpace and AVL. If you say you know all 4 to some level, and have a 4 year degree, you will get a job.
And this is just one set of examples focusing on the ECU. Need a wind tunnel to check aerodynamics? Several of these have control systems built around NI. Need to exercise a windshield wiper over and over again to see if it wears out? What about air dryer systems for the air brake systems in semi-trucks? Exercising power lift gates? Or deployable running boards? Hybrid electrication testing? Battery testing? Everything you can imagine in a vehicle needs testing, and I've seen LabVIEW involved with just about all of it.
