Leaderboard

I agree. NI has some of the best product support I've seen. But getting to talk to the right people, or convincing the right people you know what you're doing, can make the support you get very different. I had a memory leak issue when using user events on real time. The issue turned out to be my fault, but I called NI looking for assistance before I knew that. After I explained what I was doing to the first guy I talked to, he told me user events were not allowed on real time. It was at that point I knew I was not talking to the right person. One more (not from me but a co-worker). We were ordering some parts from NI, I forget the actual part but it was a common enough part that we thought lead time would be a week or so. When we ordered them they said it would be 8 weeks. We called NI to see if there was anything that could be done to speed it up. After talking to the right person at NI we found out that there was some mounting bracket that was on back order from another supplier in another country which wouldn't be available for 8 weeks. We told NI that we didn't need the mounting brackets and would take them off anyway, so they took an part from the assembly line without the mounting hardware and sent us one. Note that I was told this story and parts of I may have remembered incorrectly, and your results may vary when needing help to get your hardware sooner.

Well. Here's my experience......... I was working on an FPGA and we wanted to transfer huge amounts of data from a 3rd party FPGA aquisition board, accross the PXI backplane, to an NI board for crunching. We couldn't use the NI streaming VIs since the technology is proprietary and NI wouldn't liaise with the 3rd party so they could implement it in their FPGA (which is fair enough). However. NI said that they could DMA at about 700MB/Sec in each direction (1.5 GB/sec) across the back-plane which was "good enough for our team". The only problem was that all examples never addressed this sort of throughput apart from mentioning that, under the right conditions, it was possible. So long story short. The local NI rep hooked me up with the UK FPGA guru. I sent through an example of what we wanted to do (with which I was getting about 70MB/Sec) and he sent through a modified version with comments about where and what was important in my example for getting the throughput. It could do it at 735MB/Sec (each direction). He also sent me through an internal (not for distribution) benchmark document of all the NI PXI controllers. what their capabilities where, what measured throughput's could be obtained, with what back-planes and which board positions within the rack (which is important). Saying all that, It did take me two weeks to get through to him. I had to go through the "correct channels" first before the NI rep had a good excuse to "escalate" the issue through the system. The key is really building up a contacts list of direct dial numbers to the right people. If you know what you are talking about, they will be happy to take your call as they know it's not a silly problem. NIs problem is that there are too many inexperience people calling support for trivial things and, unfortunately for us, their system has been setup so that the engineers are well buffered from this.

I gave away a couple advance copies of my graphic novel at the LAVA BBQ, and I'm pleased to share that the book is finally done and available for download or purchase! Anticipated FAQ: Who are you? I'm in LabVIEW R&D. I write the Eyes on VIs blog. What's a graphic novel? It's a story told in comic book format. Did you write it? Yes. Did you draw it? No. I illustrated it using 3D models rendered with a toon shader. What's it about? Here's the blurb: "500 years after the banishment of wizards, the kingdom of Valheigh faces the unthinkable: the rediscovery of wizardry and the return of the legendary evil known as the Jinn. A vengeful wizard unleashes the most horrific curse of Jinn legend such that Prince Rune must either kill the woman he loves or die at her hands." The PDF version is free and the printed book costs $25+shipping. I hope you'll check it out!