LabVIEW, Arduino & Android

During lunch today I picked up the words LabVIEW and Arduino. Now that got me interested (or excited, as they would say here) and it turned out that a technical session about hacking Arduino with LabVIEW would take place later in the afternoon. So I attended and learned some very interesting things indeed.

First of all that it was not only about Arduino. To be totally honest, Arduino was a bit of a minor topic, the more important topics concerned interfacing to the Kinect, the Wiimote, iRobot, Neato and Android systems. Nevertheless they did do Arduino too. NI uses interns to develop all sorts of fun applications with their products. Waterloo Labs - who earned their fifteen minutes of fame about a year ago when they drove a car using an iPhone and posted a video about it on YouTube - is in it too.

So how do you interface Arduino to LabVIEW? It is pretty simple. You load Arduino with a special sketch to create an I/O server. Then in LabVIEW you install some VIs for Arduino. You should also install the NI-VISA serial port drivers if you don't have them allready. That's about it. And the great thing about this is that it is all free and open source!

Let's be clear about this, you cannot create a program in LabVIEW and then run it on the Arduino. In this setup Arduino is merely an input/output device, but a very cheap and hackable one for which many shields are available and you can use all the power of LabVIEW to control it or process the data. And if you replace the serial cable by a wireless link (Bluetooth f.i.), it is almost if Arduino is running stand alone.

This is all excellent news, because now you too can interface your project to LabVIEW as long as it has a serial port. All you have to do is port the sketch to your hardware and adapt the VI.

All this stuff and much more, like how to hack the Kinect or the Wiimote, is on LabVIEW hacker dot com

25 years of LabVIEW

The second day of NIWeek started with the second keynote presentation. Jeff Kodosky, the father of LabVIEW, opened the session during which he looked back on 25 years of LabVIEW.

Jeff K was followed by the part that I like most of the NI events: the user applications. Often a few interesting and sometimes quite spectacular real-life applications of NI equipment are presented and demonstrated. This year were on display a portable real-time optical coherence tomography (OCT) device, a structure health monitoring system that is being used for real-time bridge surveillance, the smart grid in Rajasthan, India (did you know that 400 million people in India do not have access to electricity?), a system to control the plasma position in a tokamak (we are talking nuclear fusion here), a couple of robots, an XBox Kinect interface for LabVIEW and a water display that uses water drops as pixels (see photo, can you see "NI" written in droplets?).

The company who made this told me that they have no practical use for such a display.

The keynotes closed with some philosophing about how LabVIEW may evolve during the next 25 years. According to Xilinx, their new Zync platform will play a role here in the near future.

That's all for now folks, I am going to attend a presentation about Arduino, Android & LabVIEW.

P.S. Thanks Greg, I received your text.

Graphical system design

This morning NIWeek really started with the first keynote introduced, as always, by Dr. T. himself (one of the three cofounders of NI). The keynotes are rather impressive events with an audience of several thousands. It is used to introduce the most important new products for the year to come. Demos have been very carefully prepared and are presented by the people who were actually involved in the development of the product, which I think is good.

I was a bit disappointed by today's keynote. It was less spectacular than last year and I found Dr. T's introduction not very inspired. The main theme to retain is NI's objective to use software to solve problems so that the client can profit from Moore's law. This was illustrated by some demos of very high performance instruments.

The fun part of the presentation was a variation of the game Angry Birds coded in LabVIEW. In Angry Eagles (as it is called) the player launches the bird with a real catapult instead of a virtual one.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot, LabVIEW 2011 was announced.