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!

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.

What’s New in EasyXML 2.0?

EasyXML 2.0 includes major performance improvements when parsing XML.  It also fixes several bugs.  See the EasyXML 2.0 Release Notes for full details.

Download EasyXML

You can download & install the demo version of EasyXML using VI Package Manager.  Just press the “Check the Network for Available Packages” button to refresh your package list, and then install the jki_lib_easyxml-2.0-1 package.  The demo version of EasyXML is fully functional, but periodically displays a reminder dialog urging you to upgrade to the paid version.

Purchase EasyXML

If you try EasyXML and like it, you can purchase the full version of EasyXML in our store.

Special Discount for Existing EasyXML Customers

JKI is pleased to offer a free upgrade to EasyXML 2.0 for any customers who purchased EasyXML on or after January 1, 2010.  We also offer a 35% discount on EasyXML 2.0 to all other previous EasyXML customers.  If you are an existing EasyXML customer, you should be receiving an email with instructions on how to redeem these discounts.  If you don’t, please send an email to customer-service@jkisoft.com with your original Order # or the email address you used to place the order, and let us know!

Title: Recursion in LabVIEW

Abstract: Many software engineering challenges can be solved efficiently using recursion.  Learn about several ways to implement both recursive algorithms and recursive data structures in LabVIEW and learn how to leverage the full power of multicore CPUs with parallelly recursive algorithm design.

Slides: Recursion-in-LabVIEW-Maila.pdf (362 KB)

Example Code: Recursion-in-LabVIEW-Examples.zip (134 KB; requires LabVIEW 2009 or higher)

Do you have comments or questions about this presentation, or do you have a topic you’d like to see JKI do a presentation on?  Post your ideas in the comments!