MLUG hits new highs with record attendance for first User Group of 2019!
03 March 2019
2019 certainly started well for the Midlands LabVIEW User Group when we held our first meeting last month. We were hosted by the Faculty of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment (CEBE) at Birmingham City University. This is the second time we have visited BCU and once again we were very warmly welcomed.
Since our very first User Group back in October 2014 we have been steadily growing as word gets out about the great presenters, coding challenges and snacks that MLUG provide. This User Group however took attendance to another level with 27 attendees across our physical and remote access options, nearly double what we usually achieve. 50% of those attendees were new to the group and we hope to see them again at the next one!
We had a few technical issues at the beginning of the session, but we overcame those and Sam Djanani from Rolls-Royce kicked off with his presentation. He talked about design patterns and how the use of design patterns evolves from when a LabVIEW developer starts out in the world of software design. He took us through creational, structural and behavioural patterns discussing some examples that can be related to in LabVIEW projects. Sam also covered strategies to reduce risk in your project and how that relates to the pattern you decide to use.
Next we went remote, connecting with Wiebe Walstra from Carya Automatisering in the Netherlands who delivered his presentation ‘GUI’s with Dynamic Panes’. He talked about a toolkit he has developed to enable the resizing and rescaling of objects on a LabVIEW front panel. It not only enables adjustment of individual objects, but associated objects within the same container. The inspiration for developing the toolkit came when he found that it wasn’t possible to handle show/hide functionality with the inbuilt scaling capabilities of LabVIEW. His presentation was packed with demos showing how he’d used LabVIEW OOP to enable flexible extension of the toolkit. Wiebe has made the source code available on Github, so go check it out and start making your UIs dynamic!
Last, but certainly not least, Hans Tang from Fazer-Nash Consultancy. He gave us an introduction to VeriStand, starting off with an overview of what it is and some typical use cases from his experience. We then moved on to the Model Based Design approach and how Veristand fits in well with this. We then took a dive into the detail, talking about Custom Devices, the Primary Control Loop (PCL), the engine architecture that VeriStand adopts and tools that Hans has found useful during development of projects using VeriStand. This was all then linked to an example project that Hans is working on at Frazer Nash. His presentation is here.
Anyone who either uses LabVIEW within their current role or works with LabVIEW would be sure to find attending the User Group useful and informative, as well as being a good opportunity to network. It is also a great Continuous Professional Development opportunity and can also contribute to re-certification.
We are pleased to confirm that our Summer MLUG will be held on Tuesday 11th June at the British Motor Museum, Gaydon and hosted by Jaguar Land Rover. If you are not already on our mailing list please do contact Jenny via email to receive updates about the agenda but you can sign up now to reserve your place - capacity is limited so do book early!
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