The first Cambridge LabVIEW User Group of 2010 was held on the 13th January in Bar Hill Village Hall.  Attendance was slightly down on previous occasions (presumably due to the weather), but the discussion was very lively and useful for everyone concerned.

 The presentations started with Peter Horn (NI) looking at the advantages of different operating systems for running your LabVIEW applications. Options investigated were Windows, Linux, Real Time and FPGA. The advantages and disadvantages of each were explained and then some demonstrations of high performance systems shown. The first demonstration was from NI Week showing a table saw application which reacts to the touch of human skin and stops the saw before it cuts the users finger off! The second was using a combination of Windows, Real Time and FPGA to load in a picture, analyse it for edges and then control stepper motors to draw the picture on an Etch-a-Sketch!

Following that we had Peter FitzGerald lead a discussion on printing high quality test certificates from LabVIEW. This ranged from using the default printing capabilities within LabVIEW, to exporting to other applications and printing from there. Again some methods had advantages which were carefully explained and other options were suggested by attendees, such as getting LabVIEW to build up a picture and print that, or using Active X to build a Rich Text File with additional formatting and then printing that.

After a break, Peter Horn again led a presentation, this time on preparing for the Certification exams (the presentation was originally prepared by Dr Richard Thomas from PTP, who was unfortunately unable to attend). As we had 2 Alliance Members in the room (Peter FitzGerald – Certified LabVIEW Developer and Peter Davies – Certified LabVIEW Architect), we were able to gather a lot of hints on the best practices to follow if you are looking at getting certified.