4 smart test methods to keep you ahead

Think back to your past year as an engineer: What happened to your role? What changes have occurred in the past five years? As the pace of technological change continues to accelerate, you must adjust all aspects of your work and increase efficiency.

In a test and measurement study conducted by Aspencore (formerly known as UBM) in 2015, engineers in various industries including semiconductor, automotive, defense and aerospace listed the following aspects in the evolution of their test development. The main changes:

4 smart test methods to keep you ahead

“Adapt to rapidly changing technologies to provide end users with test capabilities and value.”

“Designing more complex products in less time”

“Get equipment that can be tested according to the latest standards.”

"Follow high-speed communication and network bandwidth (ie 100GE, 400GE, etc.)."

“Keep the ability to test the latest generation of products without spending a lot of money on dedicated instruments that are going to be outdated.”

Which of these challenges is the most stressful for you and your engineering team? Fast pace changes in product specifications force

You expand your workbench and production line with the same or less budget. Software is essential for you to navigate these new engineering rules - not just to keep up with the pace, but to thrive.

Figure 1. Use the latest version of LabVIEW NXG to reduce system setup time, automate and customize your test results.

This article will show you how to use the latest version of LabVIEW NXG to address the following four organizational challenges and quickly move on to the next engineering design:

1. Reduce test system setup and configuration time

2. Start the next measurement as soon as possible

3. Increase collaboration between test software

4. Present the correct test data to the right person

1. Test more intelligently by reducing system setup and configuration time.

How much engineering time do you need to search for manuals, pins, correct hardware drivers, correct utilities, etc? How much engineering time do you need to search for manuals, pins, correct hardware drivers, correct utilities, etc? NI's recent survey of more than 400 engineers in multiple industries shows that one of the most important and common difficulties faced by test engineers is the ability to complete measurements in a short-lived environment in which environments need to be connected and integrated. It usually contains instruments from different suppliers.

To help you test more intelligently, LabVIEW NXG now provides some workflows to display the right information at the right time, providing more background information and help. Take a common task as an example: set up and verify multiple instruments. In LabVIEW NXG, you can instantly discover, visualize, configure, and log instruments in a unified view. If the appropriate driver is not already installed on your machine, LabVIEW NXG will provide you with a guide to find and install the driver without leaving the software environment. Once the drivers are installed, you can view the documentation, examples, and NI soft panels to verify your setup and quickly start your first measurement.

Figure 2. Visually discovering hardware, managing drivers and configuration parameters without leaving the LabVIEW NXG environment.

If you have not purchased an instrument yet, you can configure an offline system through the hardware catalog. The canvas shows which modular instruments you can use to build a valid configuration that meets your requirements. If you need to scale to a larger configuration, you can also configure the system in a tabular view and edit the instrument configuration in batches to increase efficiency.

All of these new features are designed to reduce the amount of time you spend on regular setup tasks and devote more time to truly important tasks: collecting measurements and customizing the system to meet your specific needs.

2. Test faster by shortening the time of the next measurement.

The settings for the first measurement are very important, but there are other factors that need to be considered. The new requirements force you to iterate over the test system. Therefore, you must have the flexibility you need to minimize test or measurement time, not just the first test or measurement, but also the next unknown test or measurement. In the past, in order to achieve this level of customization, engineers typically used common tools to develop and maintain specialized system software, resulting in very high initial and subsequent testing costs.

In the past 30 years, hundreds of thousands of engineers have used LabVIEW to abstract instrument measurement tasks, greatly improving work efficiency, and the intuitive functional perspective of graphical programming has benefited them a lot. Glenn Larkin, an engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said that they used LabVIEW instead of the traditional method to develop an automated maintenance system. His three-person team "developed and deployed the final version of the application in 15 months." Prototype verification is about one-third the time it takes to develop an application using Java or C++.

Based on this graphical engineering development process, LabVIEW NXG provides a more efficient development environment to help you with hardware setup, initial measurements, and analysis. Throughout the transition to customization, you can continue to retain the current drawing view as well as the configuration and analysis program. LabVIEW NXG gives you a higher level of starting point, and when you need more advanced analytics, logic, or automation, you can do it quickly based on what you've done.

Figure 3. Quickly build and iterate your test and measurement system using LabVIEW NXG's drag-and-drop design methodology.

3. Increase collaboration between test software and test more intelligently.

For teams with only one person, reuse is a manageable issue. But if the verification engineering team needs to expand to keep up with the company's development needs, or if it needs to manage multiple remote development and deployment test stations to control costs, or if it needs to expand production or increase batches, the challenge will follow. Successful implementation of these extensions requires a certain degree of standardization and a consistent set of tools, workflows, and underlying software.

As part of NI's commitment to investing in test software, LabVIEW NXG and LabVIEW 2017, along with a growing number of other NI test and measurement software, are built on the common open standard software package technology. The new package manager allows you to not only publish NI or third-party software, but also publish your own software. Often, the fundamental challenge of multiplexing is not to find an application or code, but to find the right version of the correct hardware driver. An important part of NI package management in LabVIEW NXG is to define the test code or application that you rely on to work efficiently. Because NI software is an open platform, this dependency relationship exists in test code, third-party add-ons, the LabVIEW NXG Run-Time Engine, and hardware drivers. This reduces the time the team spends actively managing software configuration, dependency management, and test system replication. In a recent NI survey, 70% of software developers using the latest version of NXG said they are likely to use LabVIEW NXG to generate scalable libraries and system deployers.

Figure 4. Use the industry-standard open package management provided by LabVIEW NXG to release all the software needed to deploy and replicate a test system.

Increasing test software collaboration and reuse depends on how you distribute the software, whether you use LabVIEW NXG, LabVIEW, or your own test code. Use industry-standard package generation and package management techniques to deliver software, taking the first step toward standardization, allowing you to copy your system with confidence.

4. Present the correct test data to the right person and test it more intelligently.

Have you become a bottleneck in engineering data? Is it difficult for your team to know the status of the test in time, or it is difficult for you to improve your productivity, just because you can only monitor the test in front of you, if so, please don't worry, not just you touch These problems have arrived. NI asked a group of test, measurement, and control engineers what they would do if they could access the test data remotely.

Figure 5. According to a NI survey, remote monitoring and accessing data is the most common use of engineers to use a web-based user interface in subsequent projects.

Respondents are fully aware of the impact of remote access on monitoring test data and/or access results. Through the network, engineers can use an accessible tool to help the entire team mine data and gain more information. Networks are not new technologies, but because of the lack of network programming experience and IT background and the need to manage communication mechanisms, engineers have been trying to integrate them into their systems.

The LabVIEW NXG Web Module introduces a drag-and-drop creation tool for the Web-based interface (WebVI) that helps you enhance your testing, measurement, control, and monitoring of your application's capabilities. Based on standard web technologies, users can view the web interface on any modern browser on any device, such as tablets and smartphones, without any plugins. You can use it to quickly create a web-based engineering user interface, and with its intuitive communication mechanism and secure hosting platform, you can quickly develop and deploy your web interface without the need for web programming expertise.

If your team has network programming expertise, you can use the LabVIEW NXG Web Module to develop interfaces based on standard HTML5, CSS, and Javascript technologies. At this point, the interface can be customized directly from the code in LabVIEW NXG or embedded into an existing web-based solution.

Figure 6. Web-based interface created with the LabVIEW NXG Web Module to enhance test, measurement, control, and monitoring applications.

Assess how you can stay ahead of the curve with test software


Given the scale and complexity of test and measurement application requirements, as well as the various tools and utilities offered by vendors, the question is not whether the project software is needed, but how best to use the software to cope with the ever-changing changes in the engineering world. Help you test more intelligently with four key problem assessment software tools. How software tools can help you: How software tools can help you:

o Reduce test system setup and configuration time?

o Minimize the time to make the next measurement?

o Increase collaboration between test software?

o Show the right test data to the right people?

What will happen in the future?


The latest version of LabVIEW NXG is one of the results of NI's continued investment in the software center platform for more than 30 years. NI's user-defined approach is designed to make it easier for you to use a variety of tools instead of waiting for others to provide a test solution so you can take advantage of technology trends.

What will your future be like? NI can't wait to see you use LabVIEW NXG to overcome the major engineering challenges you've encountered, so that the future can be presented to us faster.

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