Wednesday 13th October 2010 saw the 8th meeting of the Cambridge LabVIEW User Group take place, kindly hosted again by Philips Research on the Cambridge Science Park.  29 attendees heard Peter Horn start the presentations off with a look at the speed improvements and compiler modifications that have been implemented in LabVIEW 2010.  Particular attention was paid to the 3-stage compilation process which excludes unused sections of code and improves efficiency of the user code to give run time speed improvements of between 20% and 500%!

Alisdair McClymont then gave an interesting presentation about the Cambridge University Eco Racing team and how they have been using LabVIEW and CompactRIO to control and monitor their solar car which was entered into the 2009 World Solar Challenge race across Australia.

They will be expanding their use of CompactRIO in the 2011 car as they now have a better understanding of the capabilities.  We all wish them the best of luck! 

Alisdair's presentation is available to view in the Downloads section of this website (don't forget you need to be logged in to access any downloads) and you can visit the CUER website for more details of the challenge and the team: http://www.cuer.co.uk/

The coffee-break provided plenty of opportunity for networking before Peter Fitzgerald then led a discussion encouraging all attendees to ask questions about any LabVIEW code problems they have.  Topics that were raised, discussed and sometimes solved included:

• how to modify the properties of front panel decorations
• launching large numbers of VIs through VI server
• memory wrap-round issues on RF Signal Analysers

We are planning to hold a similar session at the next CLUG meeting so do start thinking of potential questions now!

Peter Horn wrapped up the afternoon with a quick demo of some of the vision tools available in LabVIEW, using the Vision Assistant to develop a processing algorithm and then transfer it into LabVIEW.