Next meeting July 21st

[MattWhitlock]

Hi All,

Looks like I'm taking over the reins as NOCLUG president, and Eric Davenport will be be VP / vice dictator. If any of you are interested in helping out, there's plenty of work to go around so let us know.

I want to kick off the discussion to see what everyone would be interested in discussing in the upcoming meetings, the first of which will be on July 21st.  There are a number of topics that I would like to present on (I'm about done on a Subversion presentation for next time), but I want the meetings to be directed by the members as much as possible. In addition, I want to make sure there is plenty of time for discussion and networking and not be too heavy on presentations.

Please let me know if any of the topics below are of special interest, if there are other topics you'd like to hear about, and best of all -- a topic you'd like to present.

Possible Presentation Topics

1. Version control with Subversion
2. LabVIEW for Robotics
3. LabVIEW Embedded Module for ARM Microcontrollers
4. NI Week recap / What's new in LabVIEW 2010 (After NI Week)
5. Databases with LabVIEW
6. Test Engineering or Integration?
7. Agile development with Scrum
8. Team Development
9. LabVIEW Object Oriented Programming
10. CompactRIO
11. LabVIEW FPGA
12. Domain Expert or Software Engineer?

Topics I'd like to hear others present

1. LabVIEW DSC (Eli?)
   
2. TestStand (Dave?)
   
3. Wireless Senser Networks (Eli?)
4. Mixed LabVIEW + PLC plants
5. CLAD / CLD / CLA prep
6. ???

In addition to the above, I would really like to do group code show-and-tell sessions, career development discussions, and anything else that is useful to everybody.

I appreciate any and all thoughts.

Thanks,
Matt

[tomlawton]

Version control with Subversion:  Yes Yes Yes 😉  (we're doing it, but it's fundamentally a bear with LabVIEW- especially if you're working cross-platform.... So if you have any secrets, I'd like to know!)

LabVIEW Object Oriented Programming:  No No No No.... If that's where you want to go, why start here...?!  ;-)))

As for presentations...: If our client will permit it, and people would be interested, CPP could present on the Building Motion Monitoring System we have just installed in Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building.

Cheers,

Tom

Tom Lawton

Senior Systems Engineer

CPP WIND ENGINEERING & AIR QUALITY CONSULTANTS

1415 Blue Spruce Drive
Fort Collins, Colorado 80524, USA
Tel:   +1 970 498 2363
www.cppwind.com

[MattWhitlock]

Hi Tom,

Sounds like the SVN presentation is a go for the next meeting or one later this year then.  Any particular issues that you'd like to go over?  I find that despite LabVIEW 2009's improved integration with Subversion, it's still best to go with the command line or a shell like TortoiseSVN.  Graphical Differencing is definitely much improved as well.  I have only minimal experience with it on Linux and Mac through the command line / shell.  Please share any woes/successes you've had across platforms.  Sounds like something to discuss at least.

Regarding LVOOP, I'm with you that LabVIEW isn't a great OOP language, but think it's worthy of attention/discussion as it is getting a lot of momentum across the community and it's going to be a fact of life for many LabVIEW developers soon. It's being pushed especially hard for large application development where I think it makes a lot of sense, and it is a key part of the CLA certification, so it's not going away. My personal background is from C++/Java/C# and Python, so my view of LVOOP is that it is very much an exercise in compromise and lesser of evils.  But the almost visceral reaction that we all have or encounter means that it is probably a good topic for discussion.  Perhaps an expert from NI corporate would like to be a presenter on it. I'll referee .  Regardless of that, some of the smartest and most respected NI people and NI partners swear by it, so I think it's worth it to give it a fair shake.  Having said that, I think there are many discussions of LVOOP vs. GOOP and by-value vs. by-reference, but I prefer to stay with NI's semi-official policy of LVOOP and by-value. I also think that discussing LVOOP vs. OOP in other languages is a fun topic as well. I'm fairly new to LVOOP, and would love to get some good discussion going to learn it better.

I would love to have CPP present on the Building Motion Monitoring System. I can't say no to skyscrapers and Dubai stories.

I think that having presentations or discussions about actual projects/implementations like your monitoring system are the best topics for presentations, so hopefully that will work.

Matt

[MattWhitlock]

Just talked with Nancy Hollenback, Colorado's resident LabVIEW OOP expert, and she's willing to come up to share her expertise.  Probably not for the July meeting, but hopefully for the October one.

[dowNow]

Hi,

I would be interested in your presentation on the Building Motion Monitoring System. Imho hearing in detail about people's projects is far more interesting than tutorials on LabVIEW/other product features. Individual projects provide a real-world context for understanding features based on how people are using them. It's a way to learn new techniques and mistakes to avoid.

Chris Clark

Viodia, Inc.

[MattWhitlock]

I heartily agree.  It's too easy to fall back on a set of slides.  I'm going to see if I can mix it up a little bit when I present.  More LabVIEW, less powerpoint... An odd concept really.

[tomlawton]

-slightly hijacking the thread, but did any other NOCLUGers go to the Tufte seminar in Denver a couple of weeks back? I don't think he's always right, and there's a lot of his opinion without any supporting references- but his stuff does (often) look good. I've been playing with Tufte-ing an LV panel, and it sure is prettier...

Oh- and the thread-relevance- he didn't use any PP- well, just enough to point you to the right page in the book in front of you. As he loves to point out, paper has way higher resolution than any projector- or display...

[MattWhitlock]

Sounds like a good show-and-tell.   We could all use some better UI techniques and inspiration.  My front panels are certainly bland.