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NIWeek 2015 – A Big Success!

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

NIWeek 2015, August 3rd-6th at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, TX, proved to be a big success for Bloomy and our visitors. Highlights include 4 technical presentations, five exhibits, education, awards and give-aways. For those of you that could not attend, we’ve posted a total of 12 related resources, including presentations, blog articles, and video clips on our website, which are linked throughout this article and summarized at the end. 

It was standing room only at several of Bloomy’s presentations, including From the Experts: Automated Test Best Practices.  Bloomy’s Turnkey Systems Manager, Grant Gothing, shared some best practices along with colleagues from Virginia Panel and Averna.  Grant covered the full process of test software development and deployment, from analyzing test requirements and developing the software architecture to optimizing test throughput and deploying test systems. We have exclusive video clips from this session!

Grant also teamed up with Senior Project Engineer, Hector Guajardo Betancourt to present Maximizing ATE Hardware Abstraction with NI TestStand. The team discussed the concepts of hardware abstraction and how implementing a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) can save you time, money, and frustration by reducing the impact of hardware changes, maximizing code reuse, and minimizing development effort; helping you to maintain automated test equipment (ATE) for years to come.

At Bloomy’s electronics functional test exhibit on the exhibition floor, Grant, Hector, and Bloomy’s Senior Sales Engineer, Jim Wagner demonstrated the UTS Software Suite’s seamless transitioning of a PCBA unit under test from Bloomy’s USB-based compactUTS to the modular PXI-based UTS. The demonstration touted the benefits of uniform software with hardware abstraction and a common operator interface. This novel approach allows electronics manufacturers to transition products from benchtop testing of prototypes, to comprehensive manufacturing test, with zero software changes.

Bloomy's Senior LabVIEW Architect and LabVIEW Champion, Jon McBee, and NI's Senior Software Engineer, Stephen Loftus-Mercer presented Computer Science for the G Programmer, Year 2. The popular duo presented two more of the five S.O.L.I.D principles with LabVIEW, interface segregation and dependency inversion, to a packed house.

At Bloomy’s Agile exhibit on the exhibition floor, Jon and the Bloomy team demonstrated the incredible results that are achieved in an extremely short period of time when OEMs partner with Bloomy to develop products employing agile processes. On display was a working demonstration of a microfluidic dispenser from Idex Health and Sciences of Middleboro, MA. The company partnered with Bloomy to develop a Fluidics Development Kit from inception to beta in just four two-week agile code sprints. The software is an integrated development environment or “IDE”, complete with dynamic device discovery, a custom interpreted scripting language, and a visual workspace - all developed using LabVIEW!

There was a steady stream of activity at the "Bloomy Pavilion" on the exhibition floor. In addition to the electronics functional test and agile software exhibits, the booth showcased its products and platforms with applications in real-time or hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing.

 

Bloomy’s New Jersey Unit Manager, Steven Hoenig, and CT Unit Manager, Roy Walker, demonstrated the Cockpit Data Collector Validation System. The system implements a real-time, deterministic HIL validation test for a simulated helicopter data collection system. The system utilizes Bloomy’s own MIL-STD-1553B C-series module for NI CompactRIO.

 

 

 

Hector explains the desktop demonstration version of Bloomy’s Battery Management System (BMS) HIL Test System, a high-performance platform that performs battery pack simulation for testing the BMS of advanced batteries. The system combines two series-connected Battery Simulator 1200s, NI PXI hardware and NI VeriStand software to simulate a complete battery pack in real time, in order to perform regression testing of the firmware that runs on the BMS.

Bloomy's President, Peter Blume presented Energy Storage Performance Testing with Megawatt Scalability. Peter examined an energy storage system (ESS) data acquisition and control system that performs functional, performance, and applications testing of ESSs from 1 kW to more than 2 MW. Peter included an overview of the system architecture and explored some recent test scenarios.

 

 

 

Bloomy would like to thank everyone that helped make NIWeek 2015 a tremendous success. We look forward to an exciting NIWeek 2016.

Goodbye Austin, TX.
We’ll be back!!

Readers can learn more about Bloomy at www.bloomy.com.

 

 

Available Bloomy Resources from NIWeek 2015:

Presentations

Energy Storage Performance Testing with MW Scalability  

From the Experts: Automated Test Best Practices

Maximizing ATE Hardware Abstraction with TestStand 

Computer Science for the G Programmer, Year 2 

Blog Articles 

Agile in Action - The Ceremonies (Part 1 of 5) 

Agile in Action - The Scrum Team (Part 2 of 5) 

Agile in Action - The User Stories (Part 3 of 5) 

Agile in Action - Sprint Planning (Part 4 of 5) 

Agile in Action – After the Sprint (Part 5 of 5) 

Videos

From the Experts: Automated Test Best Practices - Brief Intro 

From the Experts: Automated Test Best Practices  

From the Experts: Automated Test Best Practices - Q&A 

Media

NIWeek: Automated test systems
EDN Network
Martin Rowe – August 10, 2015

Check back in late-October to see professional videos of our demos!