We had another good turn out with 30 people attending the Cambridge LabVIEW User Group meeting which was hosted by Philips Research last week.  Presentations started with Peter Horn (NI) giving a demonstration of the SEA GPS module which can be used with the Compact RIO.  Unfortunately there was no GPS signal in the building so we were unable to get the position co-ordinates out but the code did work!

Nigel Hughes then gave an overview of the work he has been doing over the last 3 years with LabVIEW, Compact RIO and PXI at Delphi in Sudbury (including the many acronyms he has made up both for this job title and the machine names!).  This encouraged some active discussion about how he has come up the learning curve on LabVIEW including many areas of specialist skills such as Real Time and FPGA.

After a coffee break, which gave a chance for networking among attendees, Carl Robinson (British Antarctic Survey) gave a talk about the work he has been doing with LabVIEW and PXI which is used for environmental research down in the Antarctic - searching for sub-glacial lakes and bedrock.  This also included some more recent research work done off the coast of Mexico using cameras to analyse black smoker plumes at the bottom of the ocean.

Adnan Zafar (Austin Consultants) then gave a demonstration of some of the simulation features of LabVIEW FPGA.  Some of these features are not so well known amongst LabVIEW users and the information was very well received.  Hopefully this will allow users to make better use of the facilities available within LabVIEW FPGA and reduce compile times.

To round the afternoon off, a group of 6 brave souls sat their Certified LabVIEW Associate Developer (CLAD) exam which is a one hour multiple choice paper - hope it all went well folks!  If you were unable to attend the meeting but are interested in sitting the CLAD exam then there will be opportunities to do so at any of the major NI events this year - check out the National Instruments' website for more information, www.ni.com/uk