Random Ramblings on LabVIEW Design

Review of the year 2017

On the upside the cloud of stupid hasn't killed us (yet), I get the feeling that the UK cloud of stupid is beginning to affect business. It feels a little quieter, but we battle on.

Projects

Ferry Alarm Systems

Fitted out another two ferrys in GDansk Poland and it was great fun (tiring tho'), the system (cRIO 9030) is working spectacularly well. My colleague Adrian presented on it at CSLUG Dec 2017.

We have one more to do in Feb 2018 and we have the entire fleet.

We're now working on the final part of the puzzle and we'll have the entire ships alarm system. For a ferry that equates to approx 25 cRIOs.

Pride of Canterbury

SingleShot

Sadly I've had to give up on my open source reference design idea, it was just too complicated. On the upside (for SSDC) we're about to sign a license agreement with a company in the USA. We finished a variant with hardware interlocking and got the entire system (room full of gear!) through it's FAT test. The latest version of software can acquire 250 Million samples per channel for an experiment (lots of racks, lots of channels!)

Other Stuff

Pretty much finished a hydraulic bearing control system for either irrigation or generation. Got some travel to do for commissioning on this yet. A atmospheric particulate tunnel is proving more interesting than it should due to an interesting procurement policy (just buy 4-20mA transducers people!). Laboratory Management carries on. Various smaller acquisition and test systems.

Travel

Lots of travel in the first six months. Two trips to Gdańsk shipyards, Vienna for CLA Summit, Austin for NIWeek and Galway for DevDays. All of which were good fun.

Community

Another good year for CSLUG, we won another award at NIWeek for best established user-group. 4 meetings, lots of people and some quality presentations. We're lucky to have such a strong group.

Speaking of strong groups and user groups, a group of us are having a bash at running our own conference.

We've put together an excellent team of organisers and presenters and the response has been amazing. We think it's a real sign of the maturity of the LabVIEW eco-system. It will be held on the 4th-5th Sept 2018 in Cambridge, UK. Click on the logo and sign-up for updates.

Now my list of notable things.

Favourite Comment

I loved the discussions that came from 123 - Why are Businesses Dictatorships?

Favourite Band

Saw these at the Roisin Dhub (Black Rose), Galway and they blew me away. WARNING: this is not easy listening!