First Week at NI

NI PXI 8104

CompactRIO

With my first week of working at NI completed, it has been great. I’ve finished my LabView 3-days course which was awesome; the software is just really easy to use and it’s no surprise why this NI is so successful. Last Friday, a senior software engineer gave us an informal training on some of the products that NI produces; more emphasis on the product that I’ll be working on which is the PXI or Compact PCI eXtension for Instrumentation and CompactRIO (compact Reconfigurable IO) devices. These are the mainstream products that the company specializes. These are really cool products; they replace the need to have multiple single-use measuring devices with a single rack that contains as many measuring modules that you need. Small, powerful, rugged and way cheaper than those traditional instruments (eg, oscilloscopes, digital measuring meters, etc)! CompactRIO is a more rugged and much smaller version of PXI whereby this is device is used for a more harsher operating conditions like extreme cold or hot climate to high vibration environment (withstands up to 50G!). They even tested the ruggedness by throwing this device off an 8-floor building (the highest building in our campus) and it still works after that! Once he gave us a brief introduction, we were given the PXI device to play around with the LabView software. I designed a simple measuring VI (virtual instrument) using LabView which will output the PXI’s CPU and memory informations. Haha, I apologize if this is too technical. Anyways, Hon Mun and I will be continuing our informal training by the senior engineer on Monday.