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[Article]What are you working on today?


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I've mostly been working for a research group that studies new types of scintillators for radiation detectors. My most recent finished project was adding the capability of measuring "Thermoluminescence" to an experimental setup previously used just for another type of measurement (pulsed X-ray luminescence). Part of that was adding Thermoluminescence-data display to a database viewing program that wrote earlier to allow the researchers to look at all the various measurements held in the database:

View attachment: CsI.png

-- James

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I'll bite:

I'm going through the rather tedious process of porting our test stand code over to yet another version of test stand. Essentially, this means I'm re-creating low-level I/O code to feed into the underside of our hardware abstraction layer, but since the I/O list looks mostly the same as an existing one (but of course never exactly the same), it means a lot of copying, pasting, and typing until things look right. This is particularly painful when I'm keen to start testing out LV 2011 and all the new and interesting things I saw at NI Week. Oh well, maybe next week ...

Jaegen

P.S. I'm also periodically stressing about whether I passed the CLA whenever I think about it. Fingers crossed...

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Recently I've been working on upgrading two projects to accommodate new requirements:

  1. An automated calibration system for water meters. It calibrates the meters by setting a series of flows and comparing the volume measured by the meters to the volume measured by reference meters. This includes control (all the valves, pumps, etc.), a calibration process, talking to hardware with a custom protocol (the meters which require all kinds of stuff) and working with the factory ERP to get calibration data and to write results.
  2. A control and management system for a potato packing plant. The plant gets potatoes from the fields and then it cleans, sorts, packages and ships them. This includes not just the entire control system for the plant, but also a management system which tracks incoming material, production data and shipments and produces shipping documents and reports. The control and management systems are both written in LV and integrate with each other fully. Until now this plant processed roughly 150 Tons in a shift, but since it's being upgraded and more than doubled in size, I have no idea what that figure will be when we finish the upgrade.

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I'm working on an extension to the modbus rtu protocol. The goal is to make a TCP/IP to Modbus RTU gateway that will allow us to use an existing network client (or at least as much of it as possible) as a user interface for an instrument that in this case only will be reachable by serial communication via an acoustic modem (i.e. low bandwidth+high latency). The instrument runs LabVIEW RT on an embedded fieldpoint controller.

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I am building an API in LabVIEW to use TestStand and create our own Operator Interface. I am now writing some related documentation (finishing my internship at the end of the mounth).

We've got one of those - you wanna buy it? :D

I'm working on a vision system that measures the characterisitcs of intra-ocuplar lens implants, a grand communications test framework/architecture for PDHC devices, and a suite of testers for personal automated medicators.

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We've got one of those - you wanna buy it? :D

I'm working on a vision system that measures the characterisitcs of intra-ocuplar lens implants, a grand communications test framework/architecture for PDHC devices, and a suite of testers for personal automated medicators.

I wanna buy a personal automated medicator :) Lifting the beer mug manually is such old school...

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take just a couple sentences to describe the type of application you're currently working on, or your most recently finished LabVIEW project.

Man, nothing so cool sounding as other people. I've got cleanup of a NVH tester for a automotive transmission, about to start debug of a functional tester of a medium-duty transmission, and upgrading the calibration service used in our core test executive software in between.

Now, how not to kill the operator....

Best not to kill the operator... too much paperwork. :shifty:

Tim

Edited by Tim_S
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P.S. I'm also periodically stressing about whether I passed the CLA whenever I think about it. Fingers crossed...

And I passed! Woo hoo! I suddenly feel like a member of an elite cadre of hard-core developers.:ph34r: That or a loosely defined herd of NI-brainwashed nerds. Same difference... :D

Now to convince management to send me to the CLA summit ...

Jaegen

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I'm working on an automatic calibration system for a bank of MEMS heaters. It uses an IR microscope to measure the temperature across each heater, and adjusts the heater control setpoints until the temperature is uniform, at several different temperatures. The most interesting LabVIEW portion of it was writing the code to identify and isolate the active area of the heater within the overall image. The other part that's been fun, although non-LabVIEW, is writing the embedded C code that controls the heater; the driver board communicates with the LabVIEW code over CAN.

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We've got one of those - you wanna buy it? :D

Well I know you've got one, your HMIs and posts on the forum were really helpfull. (we can't buy it because: We don't want the TestStand execution view (so I created a custom one), and we want to reuse the code in every project involving TestStand so we don't want to pay for a licence...)

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  • Control system and HMI for automated device for testing laser protective clothing
  • Drivers for our custom stepper motor controllers
  • Wrappers for FTDI chip library. Original wrappers for LV are... it's not worth saying.
  • Research on fitting measured data to theoretical models of reflectance and transmittance of light for textiles. Genetic algorithms involved.

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Current project is a repair oriented 3G/4G/WLAN/Bluetooth RF test for netbooks. The WAN protocols are CDMA, EVDO, and WiMAX, and WiMAX is MUCH more complicated than anything I've worked with before. The OFDMA/TDD took a little while to grasp but I have it now.

This is by far the biggest LabVIEW project I've tackled so far but it's going REALLY well, especially since this is the first time I've worked with the CMW500 and the Tesscom test chamber/antenna coupler.

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