Greetings,

Viewpoint’s Best Practices for Test seminar series begins tomorrow! Over the next week we will be in Rochester, Syracuse, Albany, and Buffalo. This half-day seminar is free and includes breakfast and lunch. Register today!

This past month Viewpoint has had the opportunity to present at both the Rochester and Cleveland NITS. In Rochester Senior Systems Engineer Benjamin Hysell explored NI’s product portfolio surrounding data management in a session titled “Effective Tools and Techniques for Managing Measurement Data.” Managing the measurement data collected from a test system is often an afterthought during the design of most test systems, resulting in difficulties and inefficiencies while attempting to gather and analyze the collected data. We at Viewpoint are very excited to continue to engage with the NI community and promote awareness of the need to discuss management of measurement data in all testing applications. We have experience with NI’s complete measurement data management portfolio, TDM/TDMS file formats, NI DataFinder, DIAdem, and the LabVIEW DataFinder toolkit plus non-NI technologies like SQL, Crystal Reports, and our own product Aperio, we have a breadth of knowledge and experience we would love to share with you.

Viewpoint partner Stu McFarlane presented in Cleveland on using the cRIO and FPGA for engine and dyno control. Stu's presentation described our solution for controlling and monitoring GDJ's engine test stand products. These stands are intended for educational use, but are completely full-featured. The stand is run using LabVIEW RT running on a cRIO supported by FPGA code that handles the time to angle conversions required for angle-based control. We designed the system to run over the Internet, so students in remote locations can collect actual data and experiment with different control schemes. Check out GDJ's website for info on the products.

We will be at the Toronto show on November 17^th so stop by to see us. Check out NI’s full schedule of shows that continue through December.

This month we continue our series 7 Challenges for Highly Effective Test Engineers by exploring Product Complexity.

Thanks for reading!

Jim Campbell
jac@viewpointusa.com

Last month, I introduced the 7 Challenges for Highly Effective Test Engineers. These challenges affect test engineers whether they are embarking on the development of a new test system, or upgrading an old one.

Last month gave a highlight of each Challenge. This month starts a more detailed exploration of each topic. First up is Product Complexity. Next month will be Development Tools.

Enhanced product complexity impacts two core aspects of test systems. First, the test requirements demand additional and perhaps difficult measurements. Second, the test equipment may not be capable of achieving measurement accuracy or timing.

After years of delivering test systems, Viewpoint test engineers have learned a few ways to address these issues. I’d like to share them with you, so please read on.

LabVIEW 2009 f2 Patch (Critical Product Updates)

LabVIEW R&D is releasing a second patch for LabVIEW 2009. This patch, entitled "f2," includes 11 new fixes as well as the two fixes from the f1 patch released previously. NI strongly recommends that you all download and install this patch due to potential edit-time and run-time errors that can occur. A complete list of all fixes in this release as well as more details on the most critical fixes can be found at this KB.

Windows XP Availability for PXI Controllers Extended To 2016

On June 30th, 2008 Windows XP Professional & Home editions were marked as obsolete by Microsoft. Since then, NI has been offering Windows XP preinstalled on our controllers by exercising downgrade rights from Windows Vista. With the upcoming release of Windows 7, we’ll have the option to downgrade from Windows 7 directly to Windows XP. Microsoft has also made available another SKU of Windows XP Professional called as Windows XP Professional for Embedded Systems (XP FES). Microsoft has committed to supporting Windows XP Pro FES through 2016. More information on Microsoft Embedded Events and Seminars.

On October 14, 1878, Thomas Edison filed his first patent application for “Improvement in Electric Lights” (U.S. Patent 0,214,636). After many experiments with platinum and other metal filaments, Edison returned to a carbon filament. The first successful test was on October 22, 1879, and lasted 13.5 hours.

Edison continued to improve this design and a year later filed for a another U.S. patent for an electric lamp using "a carbon filament or strip coiled and connected ... to platina contact wires." The patent was granted on Jan 27, 1880 and it described several ways of creating the carbon filament including using "cotton and linen thread, wood splints, papers coiled in various ways”. It was not until several months after this patent was granted that Edison and his team discovered that a carbonized bamboo filament could last over 1200 hours.

To register, visit ni.com/training
or call 585-475-9555.