The millionth package deserves a party, even in the middle of workday.

Inside the Numbers

On one hand, this was a long time coming, but on the other hand we’ve gotten here pretty quickly. We started counting in 2007, and this graph shows the total VI Packages downloaded since then.

We started off modestly; only about 100,000 packages were served the first year. After that, though, the curve starts to bend. If you divide the graph into two halves, it took about 40 months to serve the first 500,000 packages and only about 20 months to serve the next 500,000.

This acceleration is also reflected in the month-by-month package download rate:

There are some bumps in the data, but the monthly package download rate has been increasing linearly ever since we started tracking it and VIPM currently serves up around 30,000 packages per month.

So What Does This Mean?

This means a lot of things. Obviously, we’re proud of VIPM’s success and we hope we’re making it easier for people to create, share, and sell LabVIEW add-ons. The data, I think, implies we’re making progress there.

But more than that, it shows that the LabVIEW community and “LabVIEW Ecosystem” remain healthy, vibrant, and not just growing but accelerating. We wouldn’t have these numbers without the strong community leadership we see from OpenG, LAVA, and NI Community members.

Our data, then, doesn’t just reflect the growth of VIPM, it reflects the growth of the LabVIEW platform itself. Every day, more and more people are doing better software engineering and solving harder problems in LabVIEW. We’re proud to be a part of that, and we hope you’ll celebrate with us.

If you’re not already using VI Package Manager, why not start today? You can get the free version of VIPM by clicking Find LabVIEW Add-ons… in the LabVIEW 2011 Getting Started window or download VIPM directly from jki.net.

So Which VI Package Was #1,000,000?

Appropriately enough, the millionth package was the OpenG Toolkit (if you have VIPM, click that link to install the package). Congratulations to Jonathon Green and the whole OpenG team. Keep up the great work!

Join the discussion in the comments! Do you have an idea for an awesome LabVIEW add-on? How long do you think it will take VIPM to get to 2 million packages? Tell us below.

Saving Test Data In XML Using LabVIEW
by Dan Shangraw, P.E.
Owner, Automated Software Technology

Introduction

Most significant LabVIEW software projects involve acquiring and saving data in some way. After all, what’s the use of all the data we acquire unless we do something with it later? However, in my experience flexible and effective data storage is an afterthought in many projects.  We focus on what sensors to buy, what cool new hardware we get to play with, and which new LabVIEW features we get to use. None of this matters to the client who’s paying us to develop this awesome new measurement system; they care about the DATA!   They need data that solves their measurement problem, and they need that data to be compatible with the analysis tool they are proficient in (Excel, DIAdem, MATLAB, Origin, etc).  They also need the data to be in a format that is well-known, mature, and will still be supported in ten or twenty or more years. A file format that meets all of these requirements is XML.

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a markup language that defines rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable.  In wide use since 1998, it is governed by an open standard and is supported by virtually every popular analytical program. XML-based formats have even become the default for many programs including Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, and Apple’s  iWork. And because XML files are plain ASCII text, your data is future-proof; you’ll still be able to read it 10, 20, or even 50 years from now.

Since this article is about data and LabVIEW, I’ll focus on how to save data acquired by LabVIEW in an XML format. I will also show you how to easily view and analyze that XML data using Microsoft Excel.

The XML Format

In the following example, let’s assume we have a LabVIEW program that monitors temperature and pressure.  We want to save the temperature and pressure data to a file along with some header information.  The header information will be Test Operator, Test Comments, and Sample Rate.

Below is an example of the sample data in an XML format.

<Test Operator="Dan" Comments="Test Passed" Sample_Rate_Hz="10">
   <Data>
     <Temperature_C>1</Temperature_C>
     <Pressure_psi>2</Pressure_psi>
   </Data>
   <Data>
     <Temperature_C>3</Temperature_C>
     <Pressure_psi>4</Pressure_psi>
   </Data>
   <Data>
     <Temperature_C>5</Temperature_C>
     <Pressure_psi>6</Pressure_psi>
   </Data>
 </Test>

If you look closely at the XML above, you can see XML’s simple, self-describing syntax. The first line contains the “root” of the XML structure, in our case <Test>.   This first line also contains attributes of the root: Operator, Comments, and Sample Rate. The next lines describe child elements of the root, in our case data samples which each have a temperature and a pressure element.  The values for an element are between each tag e.g. <Temperature_C>Test1</ Temperature_C >.  A tag is what identifies an element and has the following syntax:

<Name>Value</Name>

Creating XML Files in LabVIEW

The easiest way to create XML files in LabVIEW is to use JKI’s EasyXML add-on for LabVIEW. There are other ways to do the same thing, such as by using LabVIEW’s built-in XML functions; however these built-in functions add data that only pertains to LabVIEW and they generate XML that can’t be easily loaded by tools like Excel.  This defeats the purpose an open file format that can be read with any analysis tool.  EasyXML, by contrast, creates XML data that follows the standard XML format.

EasyXML is also much easier to use than LabVIEW’s native XML functions. All I need to do to generate a properly formatted XML file containing my data is to create a Cluster containing the data I want to save and use EasyXML to turn it into standard XML:

Writing LabVIEW data to disk the easy way...

In this example I am using Easy Generate XML.vi.  This VI converts a LabVIEW Cluster into an XML formatted string.   Then I just save the XML formatted string to a text file. I could make this code even simpler by using Easy Write XML File.vi.

...and the even easier way.

Note: Both these images are VI Snippets. To use this code yourself, just drag the image into a LabVIEW Block Diagram.

The cluster that is wired into Easy Generate XML.vi contains the attributes and acquired data I want to store.  The attributes are in a cluster named “#attributes,” which EasyXML automatically converts into XML attributes.  The data is an array of cluster elements named “Data.”  Each array element contains a single sample for temperature and pressure.

Reading XML Data With Excel

Data is useful only if you can read it with a tool and do something with it. For this example we’ll use Microsoft Excel because almost everybody has Excel, and because Excel makes working with XML really easy. Below is a screen shot of our sample XML file, viewed in Excel.

Importing XML data into Excel.

As you can see, Excel displays the XML data in a very familiar and easy-to-use table. Now we can use Excel’s native functions to analyze the data.

Filtering XML Data With Excel

In the image above, Excel has automatically used our XML tags as column headers .  We can filter data by clicking the column header dropdown as seen below. The built-in filtering tools allow us to easily inspect portions of our data, and we can also use custom filters to build complex drill-downs.

Using Excel's built-in filters with XML data.

Creating a simple numeric filter.

The above 2 screenshots show how I specified a filter to only show data greater than 4.

Our data after applying the filter.

The above screenshot shows what the data looks like filtered.  Our sample file only has 3 datapoints in it, but these same features allow us to inspect vastly larger datasets easily.

Conclusion

Saving data in an XML format can be very powerful because XML is a popular, well-supported, and open standard for data exchange, and what I’ve shown above is just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve seen how easily Excel reads and manipulates XML data, but you can also use many other powerful tools like National Instruments DIAdem.

How do you use XML to store and manipulate your data? Leave a comment and tell us!

If you’re in the Bay Area, don’t miss next Wednesday’s Bay Area LabVIEW User Group meeting!

The Time: Tuesday, February 7th, 2012  5:45 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
The Place: The Lookout at 605 Macara, Sunnyvale, CA 94085
To Register: Sign up here.

JKI Project Engineer Joe Lee will give a talk called, “Closing the Loop: Generating LabVIEW Data Structures from XML.” He will be discussing how (and why) to use XML with LabVIEW for web application interfacing, configuration management, and flexible data storage. You will learn how to take XML data and start manipulating it right away using EasyXML, and if there’s time Joe will show off a new, unreleased EasyXML feature that analyzes XML code and generates the corresponding LabVIEW cluster automatically.

Joe will be joined at this meeting by NI Field Engineer Logan Herr, and Dmitry Sagatelyan from Arktur Technologies, who will each be sharing presentations on LabVIEW Design Patterns.

So come for the LabVIEW and stay for the food, drinks, and community! We hope to see you there.

Every Fall for the last three years I’ve made a pilgrimage to absorb wisdom face-to-face from software greats like Seth Godin, Joel Spolsky, and Eric Ries at the Business of Software (BoS) conference.

It’s an expensive conference, but it’s worth every penny to get the latest, greatest insights from movers and shakers who understand both business and technology, and whose ideas are shaping the future of software entrepreneurship. And the opportunity to mingle with like-minded entrepreneurs is priceless!

BoS also has a Lightning Talk competition – short, fast-paced talks that consist of 15 slides, set to auto-advance every 30 seconds. Giving a Lightning Talk is not for the faint of heart. This year, prospective speakers were required to submit audition videos. Those selected as finalists are invited to give their talks at the conference itself, where the audience votes to determine the “Best Lightning Talk” for the year.

What's Your Tuva?

I’ve been nudging Justin for years to come along, but he never could swing it. This year, though, he decided to “earn” his way by submitting a Lightning Talk (also he likes to do this sort of crazy stuff). So he put together a video and sent it along. And in the face of stiff competition, he got accepted to speak!

So this October, both Justin and I trekked to Boston to attend Business of Software 2011. Like the last two years, the conference was incredible! For the first two days, we were awed by speakers like Dr. Clayton Christensen, the Harvard professor who wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma and other award winning books. Praxeology expert Rory Sutherland blew us away with his insights applying human behavioral science and economics to business situations. Dharmesh Shah, Hubspot founder and author of Inbound Marketing, showed us in detail how to build a bad-ass software business. Jason Cohen, author of popular blog A Smart Bear, rocked the house with his insights on Naked Business: How Honesty Makes Money. (Justin’s and my detailed notes for the sessions are online here).

The Lightning Talk competition happened towards the end of the second day. This year there were five talks, all by really smart people who can present really really well:

• Corey Reid, Cat-herder at Freshbooks on Hiring Developers
• Karl Treier, CTO/Partner at Prospect Stream on Tips on Starting a Software Company
• Justin’s talk – the only “non-business” one: Getting to Nowhere – the story of Richard Feynman’s ‘last journey’ to a country called Tannu Tuva, and what a lifelong quest means for all of us
• Patrick Foley, Evangelist and popular blogger from Microsoft on Confessions of a Wannapreneur
• Tyler Rooney, Founder/CEO of 4ormat on Things I Learned the Hard Way at Amazon.com

All of the talks were outstanding — which makes it even more of an accomplishment that the BoS audience voted Justin’s talk the winner of the contest! As he introduced the speaker after Justin, Conference Organizer and emcee Mark Littlewood said Justin’s talk brought tears to his eyes. For the rest of the conference, I heard people asking each other, “What’s your Tuva?” In other words, what’s the quest that gives meaning and adventure to your life?

Just getting up in front of this crowd of software superstars and not embarrassing oneself is reason for celebration, but winning the competition is truly a special accomplishment! Not only did Justin receive a Kindle for his efforts, but he won a full speaking slot at next year’s Business of Software conference (October 1-3 in Boston). So from all of us here at JKI, a big congratulations goes out to Justin, who had the focus and courage to step out in search of his Tuva.

Stay tuned – we’ll post the video of Justin’s talk as soon as it’s available! And Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at JKI!

If you’re like me, it’s easy to think of social media and forums as just a big hole in the internet you throw your productivity into. But that’s not always true – spending time socializing on LAVA, the NI Forums, etc., can be a great way to increase technical knowledge and build your own professional standing and confidence.

What tools tips and tricks do you use to stay connected to the LabVIEW community? Leave a comment below and tell the world.

Presentation Highlights
Even if you’re already plugged into the LabVIEW Ecosystem, skip to Slide 23 to see LabVIEW Block Diagrams that illustrate helpful techniques and tools for staying involved with the community (it’s easier if you view the slideshow full screen). You’ll also find an introduction to my favorite tools for staying plugged into The Discussion — RSS feeds and Google Reader.

During the presentation, I also introduced LVFeed. LVFeed is a bundle of RSS feeds designed to keep you engaged with interesting LabVIEW content. Check out slide 35 to get started.

Title: The Business Side of Social: Put the LabVIEW Community to Work for You

Abstract: The LabVIEW Ecosystem offers a wealth of “social media” resources — so many that it can sometimes be hard to find the technical information you really need. Jack Dunaway will share his secrets on how to get a great return on time invested in the LabVIEW Community. Learn how to equip yourself with online tools that give you the inside scoop on the latest engineering techniques and keep you at the top of your game.

It was an outstanding and busy week, and in the hubbub, we didn’t have time to post our first-day-of-NIWeek Live Wires newsletter here on the blog, so here it is now.

Take a look at Live Wires to check out the latest LabVIEW Community and JKI happenings! This newsletter is an “NIWeek special,” so if you didn’t make it to the conference, you can catch up on some of the exciting news and events. And if you did attend, you might have missed some of these tidbits.

Better yet, sign up to receive the newsletter directly (don’t worry, we won’t spam you incessantly – it only goes out every few months).  After you read it, we’d love to hear your thoughts on how to make it even better! What other articles would you like to see? What are you sick of seeing? Leave a comment and tell us…

JKI's EasyXML Toolkit wins LabVIEW Add-on of the Year award in the VI Library category

Live from NIWeek 2011… we’re delighted to announce that NI has selected JKI’s EasyXML Toolkit as a LabVIEW Add-on of the Year in the VI Library category!

The EasyXML Toolkit for LabVIEW is a simple set of VIs that make generating and parsing XML data in LabVIEW as easy as creating a cluster. It’s NI Certified as Gold Compatible with LabVIEW.

Try it! You can download the free trial directly from within LabVIEW 2011.  Just click on the Find LabVIEW Add-ons… link in the Getting Started window to launch the LabVIEW Tools Network. Search for EasyXML, and click the Install button.  VIPM will automatically download and install EasyXML into LabVIEW, and you’ll find it in your palettes immediately.

Also check out how NI uses the EasyXML toolkit to support the FIRST Robotics championships, in which NI Application Engineer Patrick Corcoran notes that “JKI’s EasyXML made XML easy, to the point that we may have gotten spoiled with it.”

Winners of the 2011 LabVIEW Add-on Awards, surrounded by Jeffs (Meisel on the left, Kodosky on the right)

Saturday night (July 30)
NI throws their Sales Conference the weekend before NIWeek. So if you happen to be in town super-early, text your friendly NI Sales folks Saturday night after dinner to find the party. Or just go wandering around downtown and keep an eye out. Buffalo Billiards and Maggie Mae’s on 6^th Street are typical haunts, as are Cedar Street and Fado Irish Pub on 4^th Street.

For additional haunts, check out this handy Map of Cool NIWeek Spots that Mark Balla (@mballa) posted on the LAVA Forum.

Sunday night (July 31)
Approx 8pm: If you’re in town Sunday night, join your LAVA friends at The Ginger Man for an informal pre-conference warm-up. Drop by and grab a few beers before things get hectic! There’s no official time for this, but generally people start wandering in at 8pm or so.  Check the LAVA NIWeek forum to see if people are talking about it!

Monday night (August 1)
5:30-7pm: Don’t miss the NIWeek Kick-off Party in the Expo hall – free BEvERages on NI. This year NI celebrates the 20^th anniversary of theAlliance program, so there just might be an even bigger party than usual…

Tuesday night (August 2)
5-7pm: Enjoy another night of free food, beer, and music on NI at the Community Block Diagram Party and Happy Hour in the Expo hall. You can watch the Challenge the Champions contest in the Technology Theater, participate in the third annual expo floor scavenger Hunt starting at the Connect @NIWeek lounge, or play with robots and meet robotics mentors who want to make a difference in the engineering industry.

If you want to Challenge the Champions on interactive trivia yourself, sign up in the LabVIEW Zone. You can catch the Coding Challenge finals on Thursday from 12-1pm in the Technology Theater.

7-9pm: 2011 LAVA/OpenG NIWeek BBQ – Celebrating its 10^th year! Eat, drink and be merry with your LAVA and OpenG friends with delicious BBQ at Austin’s classic Scholz Garden. You don’t need to be a community member – everyone’s welcome!  Buy your $30 ticket in advance in this LAVA thread.

8:30pm-?: For the 4th year in a row, the Dan Quinn Band will be performing on the great patio at 4th Street’s Fado Irish Pub in downtown Austin. Dan does an outstanding show – and he’s an NI DSM – so he always draws an enthusiastic crowd.

Wednesday night (August 3)
7-10:30pm: The Big Bash, aka Annual NIWeek Conference Party – a party you don’t want to miss! Food, drinks, and dancin’ fools flow freely here. This year we have the most awesome venue: the brand-new Austin City Limits theater, where concerts are recorded for the popular music series. And it’s right on 2^nd Street, so you can very easily walk (no buses this time!).

Thursday night (August 4)
If you haven’t fallen over from exhaustion, rally your new friends and enjoy Austin!

A few tips:

• Outside, Austin is HOT this time of year, usually in the 100s. Dress accordingly.
• Inside, the AustinConvention Centeris freezing cold.  Seriously, it’s like a meat locker. Dress accordingly.
• Keep up with the chaos of the NIWeek social activities by following the hashtags #niweek and #lavag on Twitter!  We’ll be posting about the latest happenings too – follow us at @jkisoftware. And if you’re having fun, tweet about it and tell the world!

In addition to showing off some cool new stuff in our booth, you’ll also find us presenting various technical sessions. Come soak up the LabVIEW secrets our experts are sharing…

The Business Side of Social: Put the LabVIEW Community to Work for You
Tuesday, August 2^nd – 1-2 PM, Room 10C

Jack Dunaway, LabVIEW Champion, Certified LabVIEW Architect, and top contributor to the LabVIEW Idea Exchange, shares his secrets about how to get a great return on time invested in the LabVIEW Community. He’ll also show you how to equip yourself with online tools that give you the inside scoop on the latest engineering techniques to keep you at the top of your game.

Beyond State Machines: Building Modular Applications in LabVIEW
Tuesday, August 2^nd – 2:15-3:15 PM, Room 14

Nearly every significant LabVIEW application uses multiple loops and several pieces of hardware… and coordinating these moving pieces can create a recipe for unreadable code. Justin Goeres, Certified LabVIEW Architect and JKI Product Marketing Manager, will teach you how to use a template for inter-process communication based on “public” and “private” events that is easy enough for intermediate developers but powerful enough for Certified LabVIEW Architects.

5 Clever Debugging Techniques for Every LabVIEW Developer
Wednesday, August 3^rd – 4:45-5:45 PM, Room 10C

Do you want to be a LabVIEW bug assassin? Do you want to identify, isolate, and fix bugs faster than your coworkers by using clever tricks? Omar Mussa, Certified LabVIEW Architect and Senior JKI Project Engineer, will show you several powerful built-in LabVIEW debugging techniques, ranging from simple tools like Retain Wire Values to the best LabVIEW debugging feature that no one knows about.

Manage Reusable Code and Build Commercial Software with the VI Package Manager
Tuesday, August 2^nd – 10:30-11:30 AM, Room 18C or Thursday, August 3rd – 10:30-11:30 AM, Room 18C — pick your favorite time (both sessions are the same.)

Do you need to package your LabVIEW code in reusable components that are easy to track and share with other users, easily install VIs on multiple computers and versions of LabVIEW, or license your LabVIEW packages to quickly turn your code into a commercial product? NI’s Robert Des Rosier, assisted by VIPM Product Manager and JKI Senior Engineer Michael Aivaliotis, will teach you how to set up the most efficient processes for your team to build and distribute VIs and utilities for free.

Bonus for Special People: Chris Roebuck on Data Driven Test
Monday, August 1^st at 6:00 PM – by invitation only

Finally, if you’re fortunate enough to have received an invitation to NI’s Test Leadership Forum event, please join one of our favourite customers, Chris Roebuck from Astrium Ltd., to learn about Data Driven Test in the space industry!

Overview

Many organizations have invested heavily in test data management systems. Understanding how your test data can be used to improve the business results involves considering both the nature of your company’s business and how the data should be stored and accessed. This session will cover key performance indicators and tools that can help test engineers improve business results across various stages of the product life cycle.

“That’s all great stuff!” you say. “But what about those legendary NIWeek parties for after-hours fun?” No worries, we’ve got you covered there too. Stay tuned for our upcoming blog later this week, JKI’s Unofficial Guide to NIWeek Fun…

Chris’s UK-based team is responsible for designing, manufacturing and testing satellite payload equipments (yes, equipments*!), typically radio frequency (RF) equipment such as frequency converters, power amplifiers, and digital signal processing (DSP) hardware. Their satellites handle everything from Earth observation to space exploration and telecommunications infrastructure.

Astrium-built Hot Bird 7 Satellite. Photo ©Astrium

As Chris so eloquently put it, “there are no field returns from space.” If something breaks, it stays broken and it may compromise the whole mission! That means Astrium products must provide 100% reliable in-orbit service. To ensure this level of quality, Chris’s team runs tests of all kinds, from physical tests such as shock and vibration to system performance test in a thermal vacuum. They test everything from single hybrid subassemblies (the building blocks) to complete functional systems, such as multi-channel frequency converters and solid state power amplifiers. Some of these test campaigns are months in duration.

Chris’s large team had a code base of tens of thousands of VIs with lots of duplication and no clear ownership of the code. They knew they needed a VI reuse library so that team members could own various parts of the code, test them thoroughly, and make them available to everyone.

Chris and his team used JKI’s VI Package Manager to promote LabVIEW code reuse, create a central VI repository, and eliminate duplication of work. As an added benefit, they can now instantly recreate any LabVIEW project environment if the shipping product needs support.

Read the case study to learn how.

What’s your favorite LabVIEW-powered space application? Leave a comment and tell us…

* “Equipments” is a space industry term! Didn’t you know?