A little experiment

Let me do a little experiment with you. Here at National Instruments we tend to put a lot of information in PowerPoint format. Well, I've recently seen in Jim Cahill's blog how he shares slides using SlideShare, so I decided to give it a try myself.

Let me know what you think. Enjoy!

How To Improve PID

View more Microsoft Word documents from JavierGutierrez.

No software? No problem!

Hello there!

I've recieved some emails asking how to run the code I shared in the previous posts. Users might be interested in LabVIEW for simulation but don't have LabVIEW and/or some of the extra libraries needed.

Fear not, Guti is here to help you out!

National Instruments allow users to download LabVIEW-related software for free and evaluate it for 30 days. Follow this link to get the software

https://lumen.ni.com/nicif/us/evaltlktcds/content.xhtml

here, you can download not only core LabVIEW, but also very cool related toolkits and modules like the Control Design and Simulation Module, System Identification Toolkit, PID Control Toolkit, Real Time Module, FPGA Module, Statechart Module and more..

Go ahead, download all of them! but make sure you have a broadband connection :D

Now that you have the product, let me help you get started. There are a number of tutorials about LabVIEW on the web, but I have to suggest one place to start with, check out this link

I know, I know, you are eagerly to get started and don't feel like spending hours reading manuals, right. Well, here are a couple of youtube videos for the control geek that there is in you! Emily recorded a while ago, but is still valid




Here is one I just recorded (sorry, my voice is not as nice as Emilie's) the other day using the simulation loop



Enjoy!

Will LabVIEW take us to warp speed?

I don't know many engineers that are not fun of Star Trek. It's probably one of the first TV shows/movies where engineering had and leading role; as a matter of fact I do know a few engineers to whom Star Trek was their inspiration to became engineer.


One of the recurring topics is the propulsion, or the warp engine. It seems the engineering crew deck (and Scotty, LaForge, Be'Elanna an others) are always struggling to maintain the warp core "contained". I've always guessed that containment was some kind on magnetic field, since the exotic matter that power the different Enterprise ships might not be just put into a fuel tank.

That let me think of one application at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching, Germany, where researchers implemented a tokamak control system to more effectively confine plasma. Probably the most cool technology used in this application was LabVIEW's capability to leverage multiple cores present in computers to split matrix multiplication operations using a data parallelism technique on an octal-core system


LabVIEW is also bringing us closer to interact with machines using our voice (or thought). Here is an application where a wheelchair was controlled using the mind. The question is, are we going to program LabVIEW???

Enjoy!

Time to share some code

By popular request, here are the code of the two examples we've posted before.


Let me start with the pendubot. I reused (A.K.A "stole") this code from Alex. This example does it all! It linearizes a the (obviously non-linear) model, designs a full state controller, simulate the behaviour of the controller with the non linear system and, if you happen to have a pendubot and a cRIO at hand, actually runs the controller to the real think! All you need is LabVIEW and the Control Design and Simulation module (for the design and simulation) and the Real Time and FPGA module (for the controller).

By the way, if you run the controller, you can actually see how the 3D picture does the same as the real thing!. You can download the code form NI Community

http://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-4788


Now is my turn.



Below is the code for the Active Suspension Demo from Quanser. I know, I know.... is not as complete as Alex's, but gets the job done. It implements two control loops in parallel, one to control the "road" and one to control the "suspension" you can change both controllers on the fly as well as setpoint magnitude and frequencies


http://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-4789

Enjoy!