Where Has LabVIEW Taken Us

[swatts]

I'm pretty sure I did a presentation on this some time ago, sadly I seem to have lost it so I can't just regurgitate it here!!

A few years back there was a marketing campaign based around how learning LabVIEW could lead you into different skill areas and work. Normally these fly right over my head, but this one made an impact.

So this article will be pretty self-indulgent, but the point is that the link between LabVIEW and the hardware it can drive can push your career into new and interesting areas.

Below is a slide from my presentation on immediacy, it maps the way SSDC has changed from a mainly Test based company to much more of a Distributed Machine control company.

All of our experience has stemmed from designing test and production equipment from the factory floor (to those of you that have never seen a factory, they are what industrial estates used to be full of back in the olden days).

A few years back we saw the test market becoming increasingly commoditised and so decided to look for work in other areas (a decision also based on the fact we were bored with designing test systems). RT came along and we embraced it for control work, both in Factory Control and Machine Control.

The first factory control job was for Mclaren where we designed the composite moulding plant for the body and chassis (worlds first!) for this beauty!

Another job in 2005 was focusing a blu-ray dvd mastering system to 40nm on a glass platter spinning at 5000rpm. Pretty damn challenging, but excellent fun.

Databases have always been central to our skill-set and we found ourselves doing Laboratory Management Systems, these are essentially large UI applications, connected to a database with lots of screens to manage reporting, scheduling etc etc.

If RT was good for us, cRIO was brilliant!!

The weird thing was that we weren't using it where we expected to. A large percentage of our work was actually using the FPGA to hack and convert old systems communications. The ability to do this fast (1 load/unload of the buffer) has been really useful. The best thing about this type of work is that our customers have never heard of NI or any of their technologies. It's fantastic to break an entirely new market.

So this week we will be fitting a system on this ship.

It's a proper engineering geekfest. The next picture is the ship balanced on its keel in the drydock!!

This job came from Adrian cold-calling the ferry company and telling them that we could hack the ships monitoring system. Kudos and employee of the year to him as there is a lot of ships bobbing about that need this work!

So who knows where we will be in 10 years time, all we know now is that the skills that currently pay the bills are....

LabVIEW

RT

FPGA

Linux

Databases (MySQL, SQLite)

Distributed System

Communications - Serial, CAN, UDP, TCP

So looking at the original slide, a large percentage of our work is now in the bottom half of the triangle and who knows what will be added to the bottom.

Lots of Love

Steve