LabVIEW on the Road - ESC 2008

At the 2008 Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, we noticed that LabVIEW was popping up all over the place. We decided to hit the road with Embedded Software Product Manager and all-around-cool-dude, P.J. Tanzillo, to film some of the ways LabVIEW is helping with embedded design. Check out the video below to see LabVIEW being used in a range of applications - from golf simulators to inverted pendulums, to Web servers.

Another Awesome Robotics System from RoMeLa

Dr. Dennis Hong and the students at RoMeLa (Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory) at Virginia Tech have developed yet another cool robotics system. You might remember this group as the team that took home the grand prize at the NIWeek 2007 Virtual Instrumentation Paper Contest with DARwIn. They are at it again, this time with IMPASS (Intelligent Mobility Platform with Actuated Spoke System). IMPASS combines the use of rimless wheels equipped with actuated spokes to negotiate uneven terrain, making it ideal for search and rescue, exploration and even anti-terror operations.

RoMeLa used NI LabVIEW during every phase of development, from simulation to prototyping and finally deployment. But don't take our word for it, check out this video.

Public Service Announcement: New Blogger Poll

Blogger added a polling feature and I've finally gotten around to setting one up!

The team and I have no plan for what the polls should be so its likely that it will just follow the interests of the team from week to week (shocking I know). Comments about the poll can be left on the current post.

This feature is interesting because voting is so simple (moreso than leaving a comment). I'm hoping we can get some useful bits of audience feedback from it to help the team stay in touch with what content is the most interesting to everyone else.

...so if we increase our audience sample rate...and use clear choices to gain greater resolution...we can analyze the data...refine our design...building the test into the blog....<evil vi laugh>Buuuuaahhhhh<evil vi laugh>

New Controller for the FIRST Robotics Competition

From Quintuplet Dad:
Last week was the National FIRST Robotics Competition. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the FIRST Robotics competition was started by Dean Kamen in an effort to make science and technology as popular as professional sports for high school students. In my opinion, it is a really good idea and it actually seems to be working. Dean Kamen claims (and I think he is right) that kids often consider either professional athletics or movies as potential careers while they are growing up and often don't really consider engineering or science.

Last week, instead of being at the FIRST Robotics competition, I was at a conference called NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) and I went to a session given by a futurist named Alvin Toffler and his wife Heidi. He wrote the books Future Shock and Revolutionary Wealth about 20 years ago and those books contained some interesting ideas about what the future would bring (many of which have actually happened). Well, one of the things he and his wife said during the session was that when they were growing up, the heros they had were people that did great things for the world like Marie Curie and Albert Einstein. This, I think, is the type of thing Dean Kamen is trying to bring back with FIRST Robotics.

Currently, students participating in FIRST receive a bunch of parts and have about 6 weeks to build and program a robot that accomplishes a variety of tasks. The videos I have seen of it make me think that it is really fun for the kids and they also learn a ton of really valuable things they can use in college and their future careers.

One of the things they receive in their kit is a controller for the robot. In the past, the controller was a small black box that had limited functionality. In 2009, the kit will contain a new controller based on NI CompactRIO and LabVIEW that will offer a whole bunch of new functionality that wasn't available in the past. A few weeks ago, I was given the task of making a video to help introduce the controller. The requirement for the video was that it was supposed to help kids get excited about next year's new controller. I decided to put a little VI Road Show personality into it. So....here it is:

Wiimote Controled Tank

Take a look at what these Applications Engineers created at the National Instruments UK office.

Congratulations to the project team - Adnan Zafar, Rob Warham, Tom Offer and Kostos Betsios on getting this project off the ground.

This tank uses wireless communication, CompactRIO, motor control, digital i/o, and lots of other cool technologies to do its thing. It is able to be controlled remotely using a Nintendo Wiimote or follow a predefined route from the host PC (running LabVIEW).



PS Thanks to Jayson for letting me have a turn posting this week - HA!

Celebrating the opening week of baseball with LabVIEW and Compact DAQ

We here at the VI road show felt like we needed to have something up there to celebrate the opening day of baseball. Baseball and NI LabVIEW have had a long and very interesting history with each other...OK, not really. We did, however, have a cool demo at NIWeek 2006 that used CompactDAQ to measure how hard Tim Dehne (Senior Vice President of R&D and former member of the Rice University baseball team) could hit the ball. Check out the video:

Getting involved with LEGO Mindstorms

So, this video isn't actually a VI Roadshow video but is about our involvement with LEGO Mindstorms which is almost always cool. If you don't already know, LEGO Mindstorms robots come with a version of LabVIEW specifically designed to program these robots. We are involved with the elementary school mentor program where we send engineers to elementary schools to help kids learn about science and engineering and BUILD COOL ROBOTS! I actually participated as a mentor for several years and really enjoyed it. The original reason I participated was because I got to borrow one of the kits for a year and I thought it would be fun to build robots with my kids. Although that did end up being a great thing for me and my kids, I found that I also liked the mentoring part too. It kind of makes you feel good to go to the elementary school and have a whole bunch of kids think that you are a really cool LEGO genius. Plus, it was just fun to go off and play with LEGOs for an hour each week. I had to quit this year because of the quintuplets my wife had but I hope to do it again when my oldest son gets to be in the grade where they would start doing it. For more information, here is a link to our LEGO community pages.

Here is the video: