National Instruments (NI) South Africa recently hosted its annual measurement and automation conference, the National Instruments Technical Symposium 2004, in Cape Town and Midrand in November. Primary highlights included technical presentations given by engineers from the company's corporate headquarters in Austin, Texas, as well as local leading users of virtual instrumentation in South Africa.
NI South Africa branch manager, Michael Hutton, gave the keynote presentation. This session reflected on some of the applications that have been worked on locally, and how they have impacted users since the branch's inception four years ago. He also discussed future technology trends within the measurement and automation industry, and NI's aim to continue to leverage these to benefit the user. In addition Hutton presented a session focusing on building rugged industrial machine control systems with CompactRIO.
Andres Salvador-Stamm, NI international sales manager heading up Latin America, South Africa and Canada, gave a presentation on creating handheld measuring systems with LabVIEW. This session illustrated the basics of building handheld measurement devices using a PDA and the LabVIEW PDA Module. He also gave a detailed demonstration on the robustness, reliability and determinism of LabVIEW Real-Time.
Tim Fountain, NI hardware product strategy manager for instrument control, presented a session focusing on PXI and LabVIEW for test, control and design applications. Highlights included the superior software advantage of NI LabVIEW combined with the widest selection of PXI measurement hardware, including data acquisition, instruments, vision, and motion, and how they deliver high-performance virtual instrumentation systems at an affordable price. He also demonstrated LabVIEW FPGA and explained how to build a simple application, discussing some practical real-world customer applications.
Morten Jensen, with the NI Consulting Services Group, presented sessions focusing on LabVIEW Control Design and Simulation Tools. He explored the new NI LabVIEW tools for system identification, control design, and simulation, demonstrating new tools available to build custom control algorithms, from standard PID control algorithms to complex control algorithms, and how these tools can be used with existing NI hardware and software, such as LabVIEW Real-Time, to implement realtime control systems.
In addition to the presentations given by NI's international presenters, local leaders in industry presented applications and industry solutions: Shurlok International's presentation focused on the development of an automated test bench for testing electronic modules used in the BMW 3 Series; IST Industrial discussed a loose-parts monitoring system for Eskom Koeberg Nuclear Power Station; TLC Software spoke about the measurement and analysis of electrical power; and the University of Pretoria gave a presentation about the National Instruments Educational Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Suite (NI ELVIS) in computer modelling and simulation.
"Our technical symposiums have rounded off another very successful year for National Instruments South Africa. We are extremely pleased about the fact that these technical symposiums attracted a 20% growth in registrations over the conferences which took place in 2003, and we would like to extend our thanks to all the guest presenters for their valuable contributions in making the symposiums the success they were," commented Michael Hutton.
For more information contact NI South Africa, 0800 203 199.
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