We had another good turn out for the CLUG meeting in October with 25 people listening to Mike Bailey, the UK LabVIEW Marketing Manager, kick off the proceedings with a presentation on "Designing applications for the regulated industries".  His talk highlighted the important aspects of software certification including code implementation, test cases and the coverage that they provide, the funtional test pass rate and static analysis statistics.  LabVIEW has been used in many projects that require certification by regulatory authorities, but Mike pointed out that LabVIEW itself cannot be certified. The user writes the code!

The huge increase in the use of embedded code over the last decade or so represents a significant challenge for certification, due in part to a lack of development tools.  The use of well established design patterns in LabVIEW, its static code analysis facility, and other toolkits make it ideal for use in conjunction with SCM and general software engineering principles which can be applied throughout the development process. LabVIEW can be used with several popular SCM and source control tools, and the Requirements Gateway offers traceability. Mike went through the use of Requirements Gateway in some detail using a simple calculator example.  Finally, Mike recommended the adoption of the NI development and style guidelines, and pointed to the Large Application community on the NI website as a useful source of discussion material. Thanks to Mike for his insight into this important aspect of application development that many of us encounter. If any members have certification tips or anecdotes, please share them.

Next up was PTP's very own CLA, Richard Thomas, with a talk on his efforts to implement a simple "Open Sequencer" for use in situations where the complexity and cost of NI TestStand is not justified.  It is still very much a work in progress, and Richard described his approach, which uses LabVIEW classes, and the inheritance capability in particular, to simplify the implementation. It is recognised that there is some resistance to the use of OOP techniques in LabVIEW, but this would be hidden from end users.  Richard was also seeking ideas from CLUG members on the resolution of implementation issues that he had encountered. This resulted in a lively and encouraging discussion with much useful input from the floor. The group was keen to see a preliminary release of the sequencer code so that members could generate feedback. Richard will implement some examples of usage to make assimilation easier.  Richard was congratulated on his work, and the group members should also be congratulated for their positive response.

Finally, Peter Horn of NI gave a presentation on "Choosing the right DAQ device", outlining the large range of DAQ devices and their capabilities, performance and cost attributes. The topics covered included platforms, interfaces, I/O specifications for analog and digital signals and product specific capabilities such as multi-function I/O and high rate aquisition. The presentation included a useful bus comparison chart covering all the commonly used data aquisition interfaces. To finish, Peter described the Signal Streaming capability available in USB DAQ devices, where a large data pipe is used to maximise throughput.

Overall, an afternoon well spent!