Wineman Technology Blog

“I Need a Solution Yesterday”

When working with a systems integrator to provide a custom solution to fit your specific needs, the project process often begins with an in-depth investigation to examine the customer requirements. In order to thoroughly understand the application, this may involve several meetings between the client and integrator to hammer out details, ask more questions, and get additional clarification. Many times customers and/or service providers may want to speed through this process and get straight to the execution phase as soon as possible because of tight deadlines. It takes valuable time to sit through those planning and design discussions and produce multiple revisions of the specifications. Is all that really necessary?

This is a multi-part blog post. In this post I will be talking about the basics of LabVIEW and Continuous Integration using Jenkins, with future posts discussing the use of virtual machines for dynamic build environments, expanding the LabVIEW Command Line Interface, builds triggered by source code control, automated unit testing, and more advanced topics.

Guest post by Nate Holmes, Solutions Manager, Physical Test and Powertrain Systems at National Instruments

Meet with Wineman Technology at Automotive Testing Expo 2018, held October 23-25, in the newly expanded Suburban Collection Showplace in Novi, Michigan to learn how our expertise in building HIL systems can both meet your test schedules and achieve your requirements.

Guest post by Jeff Philips, Head of Automotive Marketing at National Instruments

You’re ready to take advantage of the benefits of Hardware in the Loop testing. But, before you begin, there are some common roadblocks you are likely to experience when setting up a new HIL system. You can avoid these by first assessing your preparedness for this transition whether it’s a desktop system or a full testing rack.  

I have been managing my son’s baseball teams since he was 3 years old. He is 17 now, and this will be our last season together. When I see him on the field, I feel so much pride in knowing what a great kid he was; teenager he is; and man he will someday be. 

As coaches, we have always recognized the tremendous responsibilities that are inherent to coaching a team sport. The things we have emphasized over the years have helped shape who they are and will become.

The system, presented at NI Week 2018 by Cummins Inc. and Wineman Tech in a keynote session, was featured in a show recap article by Electronic Design.

NI, Cummins and WTI on stage at NIWeek 2018.

Cummins Inc. needed a repeatable platform to test more than 60 engines, ranging from near zero emissions to diesel to natural gas. The company had already tried several hardware-in the-loop strategies to test a variety of MCUs in its flagship electric vehicle, the AEOS Truck, but needed a higher level of integration and flexibility to reduce test time, space and cost on a global scale.

In the last blog post, we covered why and how to create UI Messages. Now that we have a way to use TestStand to run a VI In the LabVIEW operator interface and even set a variable back in TestStand, we can start thinking about ways to use that technology to get our test data back from TestStand.

National Instruments TestStand is software for running test sequences that automates many of the functions that are common to a piece of test software, like user permission management, UUT data input, report generation, and database logging. However, in some cases the built-in TestStand functionality is either not specific enough or not required.

Python made a rather large splash at NIWeek 2018. It got a number of mentions in various settings, the most notable of which was Collin Draughon's talk "Automating Measurements with Python." LabVIEW 2018's Python Node makes it very straight-forward to call a simple Python script from within LabVIEW. You set up the Python environment, invoke the Python Node, and then tear down the environment when you're done.