Industrial Internet of Things dominated keynotes and discussions during the annual National Instruments developer gathering known as NI Week.
There was less talk of cyber-physical systems and more discussion of benefits to managers and consumers, as well as the usual engineering target audience.
As usual, many customers and partners appeared on stage showing off some incredible feats of engineering built upon the foundation of NI products.
Dr. James Truchard, president, CEO, and co-founder, established the conference theme in his keynote, “ We have always been concerned with data. LabView is built for data flow as well as control. We have created a platform allowing standardized ways of interacting with the world that we call graphical systems design.”
Eric Starkloff, executive vice president sales and marketing, stated, “We are instrumenting the world. It’s like the Cambrian explosion of data. Diversity of data is evolving at a very rapid rate.”
He continued, “We’ve collected data for years, what has changed—connectivity.”
Jeff Kodosky, NI co-founder and “father of LabView,” devoted much of his presentation to point out the tremendous potential for the industrial Internet of Things—potentially of greater impact than the consumer Internet of Things.
One last thought brought home by Marketing Vice President John Graff involved the leveraging the power of the Industrial Internet of Things for predictive maintenance. “It can save 30% on maintenance and 45% on downtime according to US DOE. This led to a discussion of the test bed with IBM that I wrote about last week.
Product announcement
The most significant of the products announced this week was LabView 2015. The theme of the product release is, “write code faster; write faster code.”
Stated in the press release, the latest version of LabVIEW delivers speed improvements, development shortcuts, and debugging tools.
“Using LabVIEW and the LabVIEW RIO architecture allowed us to reduce the time of developing and testing a new robot control algorithm to just one week, compared to one month with a text-based approach. We are able to prototype with software and hardware faster and adapt to rapidly changing control requirements quicker,” said DongJin Hyun, Senior Research Engineer (Ph.D.), Central Advanced Research and Engineering Institute, Hyundai Motor Group
LabVIEW 2015 further equips engineers with support for advanced hardware such as the quad-core Performance CompactRIO and CompactDAQ Controllers, 8-core PXI Controller, and High Voltage System SMU.
LabVIEW 2015 also reduces the learning curve for employing a software-designed approach to quickly create powerful, flexible, and reliable systems. With three application-specific suites that include a year of unlimited training and certification benefits, developers have unprecedented access to software and training resources to build better systems faster.
Following is a list of features:
• Open code faster—open large libraries up to 8X faster and eliminate prompts to locate missing module subVIs
• Write code faster—execute common programming tasks faster with seven new time-saving right-click plugins and develop your own additional plugins to maximize your productivity
• Debug code faster—examine arrays and strings in auto-scaling probe watch windows and document findings with hyperlink and hashtag support in comments
• Deploy code faster—offload your FPGA compilations to the LabVIEW FPGA Compile Cloud service included with your Standard Service Program membership
LabVIEW 2015 is extended by the LabVIEW Tools Network, which has been enriched by IP both from NI and third-party providers. The new Advanced Plotting Toolkit by Heliosphere Research furnishes developers with powerful programmatic plotting tools to create professional data visualizations. The RTI DDS Toolkit by Real-Time Innovations enables IoT applications with scalable peer-to-peer data communication. Additionally, application-specific libraries for biomedical, GPU analysis, and Multicore Analysis and Sparse Matrix applications are now available free of charge.
