Blog

At Bloomy we use the agile scrum process to deliver the highest business value to our customers in the shortest amount of time.  Scrum allows us to deliver working software to our customers at the conclusion of each two week sprint so that they can interact with the software and provide feedback for the next iteration.  Ceremonies that encourage open and honest communication are central to the scrum framework and help to expose assumptions early by frequently incorporating customer feedback.

So you've been to Core 1 and Core 2. Good start.

You've also experimented with LabVIEW and started making some VIs of your own. Even better.

But now after a few weeks/months/years of not using LabVIEW you wake up and you've forgotten how it all works and all the things you've learned. Whoops. Even worse, your boss reminds you about your deadline that requires some LabVIEW development and, by the way, is right around the corner. Not so good.

Ugh. So what do I do?

The Actor Framework has become the defacto standard tool for developing large, maintainable, and scalable applications in LabVIEW.  For many LabVIEW developers, however, the learning curve associated with the Actor Framework seems like it is much too steep for them to take advantage of its many benefits.  The purpose of this article is to help developers who are familiar with the common design patterns of “procedural” LabVIEW development transition to the Actor Framework.  Hopefully, by the end of this article you will see that the Actor Framework is not quite so different from the patterns

Bloomy supported the automated test community with informative presentations and practical exhibits at NIDays North America conferences late in 2014.  Turnkey Systems Manager Grant Gothing presented “Plan for Success with Automated Test” to standing-room-only crowds who learned best practices for creating test requirements, specifying instrumentation, defining interconnects, and selecting the right software architecture.

Bloomy’s participation at The Battery Show Expo for Advanced Batteries in Novi, MI consisted of an exhibition, a presentation, and participation in the open-tech forum, all of which allowed attendees to learn valuable BMS test insights.

Lets start with the basics. What is a dictionary?  A dictionary provides a mapping of key, value pairs.  They allow a programmer to store a value under a key and look it up later.

A naive implementation could be done with two arrays, one to store the keys, and one to store the values.  For managing a few keys this is fine, but once the number of keys grows large enough, this will begin to suffer because a lookup will have to inspect all elements, resulting in a computation complexity of O(n).

Have you ever wondered if a film about an aging Manhattanite being roped into joining his two friends on a cattle drive in the southwest could help you write better software?  

City Slickers

Nested deep within the complex social commentary of the movie "City Slickers" there is a scene in which Curly, a software engineer turned cowboy, gives Mitch Robbins, the titular city slicker, advice on how to write great software.

As manufacturing processes improve and circuitry has moved from discrete components to highly-integrated programmable components, effective test strategies must now place more emphasis on functional test rather than in-circuit test (ICT).

In-circuit test performs a “schematic verification” by testing individual components of a printed circuit board (PCBA) one at a time by comparison against a software model of some parameters of the component. It is not done “at speed” and does not verify interoperability but is very effective at finding manufacturing defects.

ICT excels at:

How does software value relate to a 2000 year old Greek paradox?  

Bloomy had a strong presence at NIWeek 2014, with the biggest Alliance Partner booth that included an engaging bicycle generator that hundreds tested their stamina on, as well as many presentations by Bloomy staff in various conference tracks.