Updated: 9/1/09; 12:11:38 PM.
Gary Mintchell's Feed Forward
Manufacturing and Leadership.
        

Thursday, August 13, 2009

The annual National Instruments "geek bash" called NI Week was held August 4 through 6 in Austin, Texas. President and co-founder James Truchard (Dr. T) greeted a record crowd in the opening keynote with a remark about how the "financial engineers" who helped create the mess we're in should go back and do "real engineering" to help get us out. "Math the way it's been taught in business schools has serious flaws." Warren Buffet, he said, called it a "false perception" of reality. In a later meeting with editors, he said that business schools are trying to apply the laws of physics to an area with a lot more variation.

Truchard used this a jumping off place to promote the added "real-time" math capabilities in the latest revision of the company's flagship programming platform--LabView 2009. The new release also moves LabView more heavily into systems design. Truchard then went on to tackle a Business Week headline about not enough innovation by pointing out the many ways LabView users have been innovating.

NI is a company that prides itself on technological innovation. Some companies may be sales-driven, a few may be marketing-driven, but NI is still a nimble, technology-driven company. And nowhere is this seen like the latest release of LabView and its supporting cast of hardware.

NI is a company that prides itself on technological innovation. Some companies may be sales-driven, a few may be marketing-driven, but NI is still a nimble, technology-driven company. And nowhere is this seen like the latest release of LabView and its supporting cast of hardware.

The latest generations of chips are fertile field for NI engineers. Intel's multicore microprocessors offer the opporunity to show off LabView's inherent parallelism. With LabView, programmers can target parts of programs to run on separate cores of the processor and then be reassembled to accomplish its task. For example, data acquisition and analysis could run on one core at the same time another core is driving the display. Meanwhile another core could be controlling some I/O.

My introduction to field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) many years ago was their application as a prototyping platform--not as a production microprocessor chip. That has changed. LabView has supported FPGAs for a number of years creating products than can change personality through software. Now, the company is demonstrating the power and speed of the devices allowing it to ramp up data acquisition speeds to a level unthought of a few years ago.

NI Co-founder and "father of LabView" Jeff Kodosky wondered during his keynote why computer science departments have not seized upon LabView for courses in parallel programming, since it's the only graphical platform for doing it. LabView is not inherently sequential as are text-based languages. It operates with parallel data flow rather than sequential control.

NI has dipped into the wireless sensor network arena--but in its own terms and in its own way. It unveiled WSN nodes build with IEEE 802.15.4 radios that connect in a "mesh" networking topology. The protocol stack is ZigBee with modifications for things NI needed, for example NI believes that computing devices communicate using Internet Protocol (IP), so its engineers wanted to incorporate that into the network. Mentioned almost as an aside is one of the most powerful parts of the entire system--LabView embedded on a node. It won't be a full-blown version of LabView, but it will be enough that a node can be a controller, or at least an analyzer of raw data, before reporting status and information back to the system.

SolidWorks has become a partner to the extent that "soft motion control" in LabView can team up with the computer aided design (CAD) environment at the design stage so that mechanical and electrical/control engineers can collaborate at an early project stage and see what a machine can do before cutting chips on the factory floor. This partnership has the potential for a powerful leap forward in machine design.

4:28:41 PM    comment []

While I was at NI Week discussing the importance of educating our young people in science, math and engineering, my local school district was voting down a property tax levy. We have not passed any new tax for 14 years. But in Ohio's arcane school funding legislation, the state gives a minimal amount and then the local districts are expected to pass property tax levies to provide an adequate education.

So, in order to save $200 to $400 per year in taxes to support the schools, these people will see their property values decline faster than the general market. It's possible I saw $10,000 or more drift away from the value of my house.

I have to ask myself the question "what did I do to help." The answer is very little. It's a question we all need to answer honestly when it comes to things we think are important. Since I left the school board in 1990 after two terms, I really haven't done much. Well it's time to change that. I don't have kids in school, but in a sense I do. It's as much my responsibility to educate the next generation as anyones. And if we're going to have a thriving society, we all need to adopt that attitude. Most if not all of my readers are college educated. Do you want the next generation to grow up with GEDs? There are many opportunities to help. And actually, it doesn't matter what country you're in. I have many readers in Europe and India (maybe a few in China, too). It's the same problem worldwide. What are we doing to educate our young.

I'm challenged to do something. How about you?

3:49:19 PM    comment []

I've been amused for many years at the annual News item in local newspapers concerning men wishing to "dress up" again, and that they will be buying suits. Of course that was just a press release from some men's clothing association (look to see who's quoted in those articles). Well, ten years later, we're still all business casual (or worse--who's the sales dude in shorts and flip-flops?). During this week's trip up to Chicago I saw a different approach to trying to get us to buy suits--it's now casual! Billboards showed a guy in a suit, white shirt and tie but the headline proclaimed it was casual. I guess compared to "black tie" (remember that phrase?).

2:26:49 PM    comment []

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