The Hindu Business Line : Indian designers exploit graphical edge in instrumentation

Going graphical: Mr Victor Mieres, Vice President for Asia, at National Instruments’ Austin headquarters, last week, with a modular instrumentation unit that helps designers rapidly deploy embedded systems.

Anand Parthasarathy

Recently in Austin (Texas) In another age, the Visual Basic tool from Microsoft helped a generation of application writers create new software solutions without going through the hassles of low-level programming.

Today, thousands of small and medium sized product development outfits as well as academic players, in India and elsewhere, can get custom instrumentation working without having to bring in a professional programmer. Do It Yourself product design is here — and it is an increasingly graphical task.

The market leader — and for almost two decades, the only solution of its kind — that offered a graphical system design platform was LabView from the Austin, Texas-based National Instruments (NI). It is now in its latest ‘avatar’, edition 8.5.

Hand in hand went NI’s array of measurement modules that one could mix-n-match to create instrumentation systems limited only by imagination and the challenge at hand.

Recent innovations

Creating a platform to test competitive solutions for a PC-based ultrasound machine; developing an underwater crawler that gathers ocean data, 600 metres below sea surface; putting together an instrumented bench to test an entire aviation flight control system ... these are just three fairly recent examples of Indian innovation where NI tools have been deployed to whip together rapid prototypes of real-world instrumentation challenges. The solutions came (respectively) from Soliton Automation, Apna Techbnologies with the National Institute for Ocean Technology and Captronic Systems.

“NI’s latest modular data acquisition hardware and software helps engineers go the next step — and seamlessly integrate embedded solutions into their products,” explained NI’s Vice President for Asia, Mr Victor Mieres.

“Indian designers have been at the forefront of harnessing NI tools to cut out key stages in traditional product development cycles and hit the market faster than ever.”

His briefing for this correspondent came after a privileged visit to the ultra-clean shop floor where NI’s extensive range of modular instrumentation offerings are manufactured. Engineers at NI’s facilities in Bangalore, Pune and Delhi, collaborate to create much of the software that fuels the company’s flagship offerings, Mr Mieres added.

On Monday, students of Bangalore’s RV College of Engineering will unveil yet another application which used LabView and NI data acquisition modules to realise what is being called “India’s plug-in hybrid electric vehicle”, combining an electric car with a blend of bio-diesel.

It was realised by a group of engineering students and besides NI, critical help was received from the Reva electric car company and Robert Bosch Engineering.

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