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First, I would like to thank everyone
who took part in last month’s survey of possible seminar topics.
Your feedback and responses are appreciated and have helped us map out
our seminar schedule for the year. Out of all of our survey responders,
Allan Libby of MTECH Laboratories was selected as the winner of the
Amazon Gift Card. Congratulations to Allan! You can view a summary
of the survey responses here We will be holding our first seminar in early May. ‘Best Practices for Effective Test’ will be presented in Rochester, Syracuse and Buffalo. This will be a half-day event, including an open-discussion lunch, where we will share Viewpoint's extensive expertise in designing, building, and deploying test platforms that improve the effectiveness of your existing product design and manufacturing processes. More details on dates and locations will be announced in the next couple of weeks. This month, in addition to our Featured Article that continues the series on Test Driven Development in LabVIEW, we are featuring an article written by Viewpoint VP and Partner, Stu McFarlane. The article, FPGAs Turbocharge Control Design, was originally published on ControlDesign.com. Congratulations to Stu! As we wrap up this series on Test Driven Development, we hope you've learned something along the way. Please feel free to send back any comments or questions. Thanks for reading!
Benjamin Hysell, Senior Editor |
 Feature Article:
Mock Objects in LabVIEW, Part 4
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If it's worth building, it's worth testing. If it's not worth testing, why are you
wasting your time working on it? ~www.agiledata.org
In Part 4 of our series on Test Driven Development (TDD) in LabVIEW we are going to turn our attention to external resource simulation, or mocking. When a LabVIEW project grows beyond the scope of a couple of simple VIs where one developer proclaims ‘I can write that application in five minutes,’ to a full-fledged testing system, the application will likely require external resources. DAQ hardware, image acquisition hardware, motion control hardware, and databases all represent different forms of external dependencies; dependencies we will need to interact with in one form or another. This list is by no means exhaustive; there are literally thousands of external pieces of hardware and software our applications may need to interface with to successfully operate. Read more.
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FPGAs Turbocharge Control Design |
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A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is a programmable logic device capable of supporting thousands of gates. Some engineers already use FPGAs to design controls. Others have heard of FPGAs but haven’t considered using them. Every so often, it’s good to look up from what you’re doing and see what’s going on. So, first question: Why use FPGAs in the first place? Read more.
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Presidential Patent |
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The month of March marks the anniversary
of the filing of the application of the only patent granted to an American
President. Abraham Lincoln’s formal education consisted of about 18
months of schooling (he once remarked that he had gone to school “by
littles”—a little now and a little then), but he was largely self-educated
and encouraged by his step-mother to explore reading as much as possible. Having matured in what was then the West, Lincoln learned many trades and became quite an adept boatman. As shown
in Patent
6,469, Lincoln designed a
method for temporarily changing the buoyancy of a ship for navigation
through the shallows. It is not clear if Lincoln ever sold any implementations
of his patent, but he certainly knew how to navigate troubled waters. |
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