Labview Training/Certification

[Necronic]

So, I was talking with my boss about a JAVA program I was trying to create and we got onto the topic of labview (which I have no experience with). Long story short he said he could gather some funds for me to take some courses.

I checked ni's website and it seems that there are a lot of self-paced courses which are cheap/free, and then there is the instructor driven basics courses which come in at about 2000$ for a week of training that should set me up for the opening certification test (associate).

My questions are:

1) What experiences do people here have with the NI instructor trainings, are they really worth the money (remember its my company's money not mine)?

2) What value do the certifications have? Do they really mean much in the end?

3) What value would a basics course have (which supposedly covers everything the associates test covers)?

What I would need to do is be able to run mass flow controllers and furnaces from a computer with some limited logic/trip alarms built in. Yall may remember me having come here a while ago.

Anyways, any advice would be appreciated.

[Jacemdom]

So, I was talking with my boss about a JAVA program I was trying to create and we got onto the topic of labview (which I have no experience with). Long story short he said he could gather some funds for me to take some courses.

I checked ni's website and it seems that there are a lot of self-paced courses which are cheap/free, and then there is the instructor driven basics courses which come in at about 2000$ for a week of training that should set me up for the opening certification test (associate).

My questions are:

1) What experiences do people here have with the NI instructor trainings, are they really worth the money (remember its my company's money not mine)?

2) What value do the certifications have? Do they really mean much in the end?

3) What value would a basics course have (which supposedly covers everything the associates test covers)?

What I would need to do is be able to run mass flow controllers and furnaces from a computer with some limited logic/trip alarms built in. Yall may remember me having come here a while ago.

Anyways, any advice would be appreciated.

1) In the beginning of my LabVIEW life, i took the basic and advanced classes of the time and i appreciated the kickstart. This is whar i believe can be obtain from any "corporate" accelerated 2-3 days courses. It opens all the doors and makes you put one foot in each. You then decide on your own or based on the problems to be solved wich rooms you will spend more time in and get to know.

2) I don't believe that the certification adds any value for the moment...maybe in the future...in Canada there are many experienced LabVIEW developpers but only one LabVIEW certified architect! He used to brag about the fact that he was the only one. One of is former employer said to me that he was the only certified architect in canada and i asked them : Does this mean that he is the best developper in Canada or that he is the only one who sees value in getting certified? I don't see a lot CLA or CLD references...

3) It will kickstart you in the LabVIEW and NI Hardware. You will learn the basics of using LabVIEW with NI hardware, wich are really integrated together, wich is a feature that can make your experience with NI products more enjoyable, but as the drawback of not preparing you in case you will not use their hardware. Their courses are not made on a learn a new language basis, but more on a learn to acquire using LabVIEW and NI hardware basis wich as its advantages and disadvantages.

Overall i cannot recommend or not the NI training, as they are really dependant on the trainer you will get and i don't know all of them.

[Necronic]

Well, first I think I got this in the wrong section of the forums, I believe that this belongs in the NI section.

Anyways, your comment about NI hardware concerns me a little bit because what I need this for has to do with an MKS mass flow controller that is not NI supported. I don't want to waste my company's money on a training that will not allow me to work with the equipment we have, as a new mass flow controller (an NI supported one) is far out of our financial reach at the present time.

I just found out (as I was writing this) that an ex-employee here had considered taking the training classes but decided not to. Maybe it was for these reasons I just mentioned, I will be talking to him tommorow so I will ask him about that then.

If this is the case (not a justifiable expense) then that will suck. It was the closest chance to getting something akin to a tuition reimbursement I will ever have at my company.

[crelf]

I don't believe that the certification adds any value for the moment...maybe in the future...in Canada there are many experienced LabVIEW developpers but only one LabVIEW certified architect! He used to brag about the fact that he was the only one. One of is former employer said to me that he was the only certified architect in canada and i asked them : Does this mean that he is the best developper in Canada or that he is the only one who sees value in getting certified? I don't see a lot CLA or CLD references...

Perhaps all the other Canadians (and people from other countries) with CLDs and CLAs have found great jobs in the USA?

[Jacemdom]

Well, first I think I got this in the wrong section of the forums, I believe that this belongs in the NI section.

Anyways, your comment about NI hardware concerns me a little bit because what I need this for has to do with an MKS mass flow controller that is not NI supported. I don't want to waste my company's money on a training that will not allow me to work with the equipment we have, as a new mass flow controller (an NI supported one) is far out of our financial reach at the present time.

I just found out (as I was writing this) that an ex-employee here had considered taking the training classes but decided not to. Maybe it was for these reasons I just mentioned, I will be talking to him tommorow so I will ask him about that then.

If this is the case (not a justifiable expense) then that will suck. It was the closest chance to getting something akin to a tuition reimbursement I will ever have at my company.

maybe the basics 1 combined with the instrument control could fit your needs as your mass flow controller is probably GPIB or Serial.

A lot of instruments are not directly supported by NI, but once you have done a couple with GPIB and Serial it can become easy to create your own "drivers". The majority of instruments i encountered were well documented and esay to interface. Example : You send POW:CHAN1 over the GPIB bus in order to receive the POWer from CHANnel1...i believe this is the SCPI standard...

[David Boyd]

<snip> because what I need this for has to do with an MKS mass flow controller that is not NI supported. I don't want to waste my company's money on a training that will not allow me to work with the equipment we have, as a new mass flow controller (an NI supported one) is far out of our financial reach at the present time.

AFAIK, there's no such thing as an 'NI supported mass flow controller'.

Sensors and instrumentation come from literally thousands of different vendors, with nearly an equal number of protocols, interface architectures, etc. If you're talking about stuff that ultimately wires up as 0-10V, 4-20mA, thermocouple, or digital I/O, there are plenty of hardware solutions from NI which span two orders of cost magnitude depending on channel count, conversion rate, resolution, and such.

If it's a garden-variety scope, DMM, power supply, RF voltmeter, spectrum analyzer, etc. from one of dozens of major vendors, and it talks serial, IEEE-488, or Ethernet, probably somebody has already written a set of VIs for communicating with it (ranging in quality from excellent to atrocious).

When you get to the more specialty use analytical or process control devices, you may a) luck out and find a vendor with a great package of VIs to control their device (rare in my experience), b) get some half-a$$ed attempt at a LV driver written by a summer intern the vendor had five years ago (far more common), c) feel lucky just to get a protocol document the vendor publishes and start coding your own (my personal favorite), or d) find out that it's your lucky day - somebody on LAVA or Info-LabVIEW has used this instrument and will send you some working code that gets you up and running in a day.

So, is this an 1179A series MFC with the RS-485 serial option? 'Cause if it is, you get option (d).

Let me know,

Dave

[bsvingen]

I remember i had some labview courses back in 1993,　94 or 95 (i dont remember exactly), but as of today i dont have a clue of what they consisted of

Anyway, if have programmed in at least one other language before, and know some basics about logging, measurements and analysis, i think you will get very fast up to an adequate level by just working through some examples on your own (as i *think* i remember, the cources did not go past any of the examples that can be found in the installation, or in these days - online).

But it depends on what you are going to do. If you are not planning to use labview in the future, then in your case, you will probably be better off with some SCADA system that has all the capabilities built in (you dont have to make them yourself, which involves learning labview).

[Grampa_of_Oliva_n_Eden]

We teach the NI course so keep that in mind as you read on...

My self-taught LV allowed me to write some code that sorta worked but it had problems I could not exaplin.

I then attended LV 1 & 2 and as a result a light went on explaining why my apps did not restart correctly etc.

I was then able to write code that ran reliably BUT the performnace was not what I had hoped.

I attended the Advanced Course and I learned how to devlop more efficient code.

This was OK for Windows apps but when I started the RT stuff the apps would not run very long before running our of memory.

I then started reading INfo-LabVIEW and reading posts to learn more of the secrets.

So....

for me the NI course were a big help.

THey are NOT the end of the learning cycle.

Ben

[GerryS]

HI David (and all). This is my first post. Great forum, I've already found a ton of useful info. David, I enjoy the subtle humor you write in your posts! I want to take option D too, please ("It's your lucky day !!!! Someone has used this instrument and will send you some working code.").

I purchased labview last week for the lab I work in as a chemist. I would really like to be able to control my MKS1179A Mass flow controllers using Labview. I have an MKS 647C Gas Flow Controller. It has RS232 communications. From what I read, you have created VI's from this already? Again, I would like to take option D too please! My email is Gerry.Szachara@BASF.COM Could you please send me the VI's and help me out?

I'm ok using a PC and Labview for data acquisition, but I have no clue where to even start as far as control goes. I'm TOTALLY new to instrument control. Where can I start to learn? I especially want to be able to do your option C eventually (write my own code from a protocol document). But I have no clue where to start. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot.

-Gerry

-a small chemist trying to make it in a world of big chemists!

AFAIK, there's no such thing as an 'NI supported mass flow controller'.

Sensors and instrumentation come from literally thousands of different vendors, with nearly an equal number of protocols, interface architectures, etc. If you're talking about stuff that ultimately wires up as 0-10V, 4-20mA, thermocouple, or digital I/O, there are plenty of hardware solutions from NI which span two orders of cost magnitude depending on channel count, conversion rate, resolution, and such.

If it's a garden-variety scope, DMM, power supply, RF voltmeter, spectrum analyzer, etc. from one of dozens of major vendors, and it talks serial, IEEE-488, or Ethernet, probably somebody has already written a set of VIs for communicating with it (ranging in quality from excellent to atrocious).

When you get to the more specialty use analytical or process control devices, you may a) luck out and find a vendor with a great package of VIs to control their device (rare in my experience), b) get some half-a$$ed attempt at a LV driver written by a summer intern the vendor had five years ago (far more common), c) feel lucky just to get a protocol document the vendor publishes and start coding your own (my personal favorite), or d) find out that it's your lucky day - somebody on LAVA or Info-LabVIEW has used this instrument and will send you some working code that gets you up and running in a day.

So, is this an 1179A series MFC with the RS-485 serial option? 'Cause if it is, you get option (d).

Let me know,

Dave

[PJM_labview]

Gerry,

Attached are some drivers for the MKS 647C. They are coming form this location.

Download File:post-121-1169185646.zip

Good Luck.

PJM

Note: Please, be more careful in the future about where you are posting your requests. This thread has a lot more to do about certification than hardware driver

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

I also have to warn that my opinion is not completely unbiased as I have started my LabVIEW carrier as an application engineer at NI and then went to be an alliance member. When I started at NI I was shown this software and some manuals (that were admittingly less complete and much smaller in content than nowadays, but they were printed paper) and then I got a chance to attend a LabVIEW course or two.

And those courses really helped a lot. However I have to say that I had previous programming practice in Pascal and a little C so programming in itself wasn't a strange matter to me. My electrical engineering background was very delighted when seeing the LabVIEW diagrams that so much resembled the electrical schemata I had learned to think in earlier so I adopted it quite fast but nevertheless felt that the course really gave me an advantage. It wasn't so much about the programming in itself but about discovering all the little features, editor shortcuts, and tips and tricks that this course gave and also the interaction with the teacher and other students during the course.

Later I thought LabVIEW courses myself as an application engineer and also alliance member and I have to say that I still learned a bit during each of those courses. My experience during these courses was that there were two type of people. The ones that knew programming in itself did usually profit a lot more from the course than the ones that had to be thought the basic principles of programming first. Three days is simply not enough to teach someone to understand a whole bunch of programming constructs and something about datatypes and at the same time also have them get familiar with a new software environment such as LabVIEW.

But I think that is the same with any software course. I doubt there is a Matlab course that will be useful to anyone that has to be thought the basic principles of mathematics first for instance. The only problem I always felt was that NI likes to market LabVIEW as the tool for non programmers. In my view that is not entirely correct. Without some basic understanding about loops, conditionals, arrays and skalars you simply can't create a good working computer application. The advantage of LabVIEW is that these things are easier to understand and use in LabVIEW for most people since people tend to be more visually oriented than text oriented.

Ohh yes, I took the courses in Austin and on a Macintosh since LabVIEW for Windows didn't exist then and there were a few people (not NI people) in the same course that obviously had it even easier than me. They usually had the examples finished before the instructor even asked to start with them. They were attending the class to learn LabVIEW not programming, something which I haven't seen to often over here in Europe later when teaching courses.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[Mike_Brendel]

Mr. Boyd,

I realize that these post were made some time in the past, but I was also hoping to take "option D", as I am encountering problems communicating with the MKS 647c Multi-Gas Controller (which in turn is controlling several 1179A's) via an RS232 and LabView software. Any help would be appreciated, as this is currently holding up my senior undergraduate research project at the University of IL, and I fully intend to graduate in May!

Thank you for your time,

-Mike Brendel

brendel2@illinois.edu