NIWeek 2010 was a big event for JKI. It was probably our biggest NIWeek ever:

• We released VIPM 2010, a huge update to VI Package Manager that dramatically expands its scope of LabVIEW add-ons VIPM can create.  It also makes VI Package building available in VIPM Community Edition so you can build and share your own LabVIEW add-ons for free.
• We announced that VIPM 2010 is now the official download vehicle of the LabVIEW Tools Network.
• We launched our new web site and logo (and got some sweet new polo shirts).
• JKI Engineer Justin’s Popcorn Tweets demo was the hit of the LabVIEW Community Zone.
• JKI Engineers led or participated in six different technical or hands-on sessions.
• JKI Founder Jim Kring accepted the LabVIEW “Add-on of the Year” award on behalf of OpenG.

NIWeek 2010 JKI Technical Session Slides Now Available

Several people have asked us to post our NIWeek 2010 presentation slides so those who missed the talks can catch up.  Download the slides for these presentations below.

• From Prototypes to Products — Building Commercial Instruments with LabVIEW by Omar Mussa.  PDF (1.2 MB)
• LabVIEW Object-Oriented Programming Design Patterns for Large Systems by Tomi Maila. PDF (180 KB) Example Code ZIP (532 KB)
  (NOTE: The example code for this presentation requires the free JKI State Machine.  Download it from the LabVIEW Tools Network.)
• Hands-on – Build a LabVIEW Add-on with VIPM by Michael Aivaliotis (JKI), Chris Bolin (NI). ZIP (2.2MB)
• Popcorn Tweets: LabVIEW Goes Viral by Justin Goeres. PDF (3.1 MB)
• State Machine vs. State Machine by Justin Goeres (JKI), Nancy Hollenback (The G Team), and Norm Kirchner (NI). PDF (745 KB)

If you have questions or feedback on these slides, please don’t hesitate to post them in the comments below, or start a discussion in our forums.

VIPM 2010 includes lots of great features specifically tailored to help users find and install LabVIEW Add-ons from the LVTN, and to help add-on developers distribute their products to thousands of users and customers around the world.

If you’re a LabVIEW User…

VIPM 2010 automatically connects you to the LVTN. You can use VIPM’s built-in search features to find the LabVIEW Add-ons you need and can install them into your LabVIEW environment in just a couple clicks. VIPM also notifies you when new versions of your add-ons are available and makes upgrading them a breeze.

If you’re a LabVIEW Add-on Developer…

VIPM’s “VI Package” format is the fastest, most efficient, and lowest-risk way to put your product in front of thousands of LabVIEW users on the LVTN.

VIPM’s built-in features like palette generation, platform requirements settings, and dynamic license and activation binding (via NI’s Licensing and Activation Toolkit) make it easy to comply with all the requirements to submit your add-on to the LVTN. This means that your add-on will be less likely to be rejected by NI on review.

Once your add-on is published to the LVTN, it will appear automatically in the package list of every VIPM user. Thousands of LabVIEW users will immediately be able to install and evaluate (and buy!) your LabVIEW Add-on.

These reasons and more are why National Instruments recommends VIPM for building LabVIEW Add-ons for the LabVIEW Tools Network. Visit our VIPM product page to learn more about VIPM and get started downloading, creating, and sharing LabVIEW Add-ons today!

VISIT THE JKI BOOTH AT NIWEEK 2010

Be sure to check us out at Booth #841 by the Connect @NIWeek Lounge area – see expo floor map).

ATTEND OUR TECHNICAL SESSIONS

JKI engineers will be presenting and participating in several technical sessions at NIWeek 2010. Come to our sessions and learn about everything from basic state machine usage to advanced OOP design, and from commercial software development to viral video creation!

Tuesday

State Machine vs. State Machine (TS3012-SW)
Co-presented by Nancy Hollenback (G Team), Justin Goeres (JKI), and Norm Kirchner (NI)

Do you start all LabVIEW components with the producer-consumer design pattern, or do you use a full-featured state machine? Watch two Certified LabVIEW Architects face off over who has the best state machine and which features are essential for your template.

Tuesday 8/3/2010 at 10:30 AM
Room 12B

From Prototypes to Products — Building Commercial Instruments with LabVIEW (TS3032-ED)

by Omar Mussa (JKI) and Jim Kring (JKI)

NI hardware and graphical system design tools enable rapid prototyping in the R&D lab and serve as an excellent platform for commercial products. Learn how to overcome the special challenges of commercial software development and avoid rewrites in text-based languages by seamlessly evolving your prototype LabVIEW applications into shipping products.

Tuesday 8/3/2010 at 1:00 PM
Room 16A

Popcorn Tweets: LabVIEW Goes Viral (TS3965-CE)
by Justin Goeres (JKI)

Learn how the world’s first Twitter-Powered Popcorn Machine, programmed in LabVIEW, became a viral video. Listen to JKI Senior Engineer Justin Goeres as he explains how he used LabVIEW and LabVIEW add-ons to create a machine that monitors Twitter for “#popcorn” tweets, dispenses popcorn kernels, and pops real popcorn.

Tuesday 8/3/2010 at 1:00 PM
Room 11A

(You can also see Popcorn Tweets in action in the LabVIEW Community Zone all week long!)

Hands-On: How to Build a LabVIEW Add-On (HOL4021-SW)
Co-presented by Michael Aivaliotis (JKI) and Chris Bolin (NI)

Walk through the process of building a LabVIEW add-on and how to package an add-on with the VI Package Manager to plug into the LabVIEW palettes. Also learn about commonly used APIs and how to add licensing and activation to your product.

Tuesday 8/3/2010 3:30 PM – 5:30 PM (2hrs)
Room 18C

Wednesday

We Are the Champions (TS4012-CE)
Co-presented by Jim Kring (JKI), Christopher Relf (VIE), Edwin Dickens (DISTek) and Nancy Hollenback (G Team)

Do you have dreams of becoming a LabVIEW champion? Learn from the top LabVIEW community members who are recognized for their leadership, expertise, and contributions to the technical community. NI LabVIEW Champions are credible technology experts from around the world who inspire others to learn and grow with LabVIEW.

Wednesday 8/4/2010 at 2:15 PM
Room 11A

Thursday

LabVIEW Object-Oriented Programming Design Patterns for Large Systems (TS3037-SW)
by Tomi Maila (JKI) and Jim Kring (JKI)

LabVIEW object-oriented capabilities present new possibilities for large applications built on loosely coupled, event-driven components and frameworks. Find out how to reuse components across several applications by employing proven software engineering techniques such as inheritance, dynamic methods, dependency injection, and user events.

Thursday 8/5/10 at 1:00 PM
Room 12A

CONNECT WITH THE LABVIEW COMMUNITY

JKI will be well-represented at the annual LAVA / OpenG NIWeek Bar-B-Q on Tuesday night!

NIWeek 2010 is almost here. We’re excited and we can’t wait to see all our friends and collaborators from around the LabVIEW Ecosystem! See you next week in Austin!

[Update 2010-08-13: We have posted our presentation slides in a new blog post: NIWeek 2010 Recap and Technical Session Slides]

The screenshot below shows how it works.

Needless to say, this is very cool! Nice work, Greg!

VIPM 2010 has entered beta testing…

and we need your help!

VIPM 2010 has lots of cool improvements like major performance boosts, better configuration management tools, and support for 64-bit LabVIEW.  But more importantly, it sports a completely redesigned Package Builder that lets you package any type of LabVIEW Add-on you can think of.

Can you prove us wrong?  Is there a special kind of package you’ve been unable to build because VIPM (until now) didn’t support what you needed?  Are you an enthusiastic VIPM user and you want to help us improve the product before we ship it?

If any of those apply to you, please go here and sign up for the VIPM 2010 Beta Program.

We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback!

Everyone at JKI is really excited for the contest.  It’s a great way for NI to encourage & reward LabVIEW Add-on developers, and we can’t wait to see the finalists.

And if you’re planning to submit an entry, don’t forget that VI Package Manager is the best tool for creating, distributing, and installing LabVIEW add-ons!

In VIPM, after packages are installed, we want to perform a couple of tasks:

1. The first task is the new feature, so I can’t talk about it yet.  Let’s pretend it’s called Fragmenting Whetstones.
2. The second task is to refresh the LabVIEW palettes.

The order of these operations is important, and we want to refresh the palettes even if whetstone fragmentation produces an error.  But the “default” way of chaining errors in LabVIEW doesn’t produce this behavior.

The Problem: Chaining errors prevents execution when errors occur

In LabVIEW, we typically “chain” the error clusters of a sequence of calls to functions or subVIs. This is generally good practice for a couple of reasons:

1. It makes the dataflow order of execution clear, enhancing readability.
2. Downstream operations don’t execute if an upstream error occurs, which is typically what we want.

In this case, however, we want the tasks to execute in order but we also want Critical Task B (Refresh Palettes) to always execute.  And above all, we want to make sure that if an error does occur, we don’t lose that error out information.

The Solution: Clear and merge errors so that all nodes execute and all errors are captured

The solution is to use Clear Errors to make sure that there is no error flowing into any task.  Then, we call Merge Errors to merge each of the tasks’ errors, giving priority to the upstream error and upstream tasks (Merge Errors gives priority to errors on its inputs from top to bottom).

Hopefully, in VIPM 2010 you won’t actually see the results of this tip (an error dialog) — I’m going to work hard to make sure we get all the bugs out of the new Whetstone Fragmenter before any customers see it .

Learn about methodologies and tools to implement code reuse techniques with LabVIEW, presented by experts. Review use cases on internal code reuse libraries and add-on development for creating a product based on LabVIEW. Example demos include how to build a reusable library from your existing VIs and have them show up in your palettes.

Title: NI LabVIEW Virtual User Group: LabVIEW Code Reuse 101

Date: Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

Time: 11:00 AM [US Central Time]

Location: Online Registration (Click Here)

Next Tuesday, May 4th, I will be doing a presentation at Seneca5’s monthly user group meeting. The topic will be Popcorn Tweets: Going Viral with LabVIEW and JKI. Dave Britt (Popcorn Tweets co-creator) and I will be there with the Popcorn Tweets hardware to discuss why we built it & how it all came together, and also to demonstrate & discuss the underlying software architecture of the machine. There will be plenty of time for questions, too!

This is a great opportunity to get a real-life behind-the-scenes look at how a JKI engineer uses the free JKI State Machine to create robust, maintainable (and sometimes fun!) applications using LabVIEW, and how you can do the same. There’s even pizza!

Title: Popcorn Tweets: Going Viral with LabVIEW and JKI

Date: Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

Time: 6:30 PM Pizza / 7:00 Meeting

Location: Seneca5 / 419 N. Boylan Ave. / Raleigh, NC

If you’re in the Raleigh area, we hope to see you there!

JKI is proud to announce GTweet: the world’s first Twitter-driven, crowd-sourced LabVIEW software development tool!

A Revolution in Dataflow!

GTweet harnesses the combined powers of Twitter and LabVIEW Scripting to open the door to a whole new way of creating software. No longer is LabVIEW constrained to a single engineer at a single computer. Anyone can collaborate with any number of friends and strangers, to create LabVIEW software together.

Simple, Yet Profound!

Using a special Twitter hashtag, GTweet listens for commands from the global Twitter feed. These commands enable users around the globe to tell LabVIEW exactly which nodes to drop where, which terminals to wire, and any other programming tasks.

And since everyone can GTweet together, GTweet is limited only by the power of your social LabVIEW network!

Social Dataflow has arrived. Click to enlarge.

A New Paradigm in Software Development!

GTweet isn’t just LabVIEW-by-Twitter. It’s a whole new way to think about programming.

It enables your development team to bring the modern thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters theory of software engineering to LabVIEW. By using GTweet, you never have to worry about who is working on a particular VI. Everyone can edit the same VIs in parallel!

More eyes on the code means fewer bugs! More engineers means faster progress!

Social Media, Social LabVIEW!

GTweet merely scratches the surface of social collaboration in LabVIEW. Like Twitter itself, GTweet is merely the gateway to a novel concept that JKI calls social dataflow.

As the social media landscape continues to grow and change, JKI is making sure that LabVIEW, and GTweet, will set the standard. Why just ReTweet, when you can GTweet?

How will GTweet change your life? Tell us in the comments. Or better yet, tweet about it!

Follow JKI on Twitter!

If you use Twitter and you use LabVIEW, you should definitely follow JKI! You can follow the main JKI Software account, and you can also follow some of the individual JKI engineers: Jim, Justin, Michael, Omar, or Tomi. If you pay close attention, you might catch us using GTweet to invent The Next Big Thing in dataflow!

Special Thanks!

JKI would like to thank Darren Nattinger for providing the grammar for GTweet, and also some of the other secret sauce.