The Hindu Business Line : Visual ways to product design

Kids programming robotic toys and adults creating real-world products share a ‘cool’ new tool: graphical design. Anand Parthasarathy checked out the new trend at the developer summit of a key player, National Instruments, at Austin, Texas.

A young delegate at NIWeek cradles his robotic invention. Graphical design tools enable even school children to create rapid prototypes of their projects.

Babies play with building blocks — the solid, non-toxic kind they can safely chew, if they so choose. System engineers play with building blocks too — reducing the concept of new products under development into block diagrams, spelling out the stages in the building process. Their blocks are usually of the kind that you can’t get your teeth into — except virtually on a PC screen. And translating an engineering block diagram into a working system cal ls for the intervention of a programmer, an expert in the language that translates intention into implementation.

How much easier it would be if the person who thinks up a great new product could eliminate the programmer and self-generate the code that will run the end product! This secret wish of every product engineer to DIY, do it yourself — the way babies do, to build their toy houses, cars , animals, exactly the way they imagined it — is receiving the serious attention of the design automation industry.

It is creating a slew of new tools that aim at taking the maths and the programming out of the design cycle, at allowing designers to work at a higher level of abstraction, where they can mix-n-match engineering building blocks in a visual way and leave the ‘bull work’ of generating thousands of lines of code to the application. Graphical design tools are here.

A graphical or visual design tool allows the user to use icons and graphic symbols, such as boxes, circles, or bubbles, treat them as process blocks and connect them with arrows, lines and arcs to create a block diagram to represent the entire process. The graphical programming tool then generates the required code and with minimal tweaking this usually worked quite well when used for rapid prototyping using a personal computer and various measurement modules that could be used to create a ‘virtual instrument’. It was also a very quick and convenient way to check out algorithms and make sure they worked — before committing them to silicon or to that useful ‘half way house’, the field programmable gate array or FPGA.

This level of graphical design help has been available for some time — and has fuelled solutions such as LabVIEW, an acronym for ‘Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench’, the flagship product of the Austin, Texas (US)-based National Instruments (NI), that was first created for the Apple Macintosh platform in 1986 and ported to the Windows-Intel or ‘Wintel’ platform six years later.

The building blocks of virtual instrumentation were a powerful PC-based software and an ever-growing list of hardware modules — sensors and data acquisition devices for virtually every measurable physical parameter.

Instead of spending money on stand-alone test and measuring equipment, engineers could assemble the test system for a particular experiment using the measurement modules from NI or a number of third party providers. LabVIEW then allowed the user to put the PC or laptop at the number-crunching heart of the virtual instrumentation system. In many cases, such a mix-and-match solution shaved 80 per cent off the total cost of the instrumentation — with the advantage that the modules could be reused indefinitely, while the software could be updated whenever improvements or the changes in the PC’s own operating environment so dictated.

The Internet served as a catalyst for virtual instrumentation, by enabling data sharing — and the direct transfer of results from the measurement device to phones and hand-held computers.

Its annual developer ‘mela’, NIWeek, in Austin, earlier this month, saw NI unveil the latest avatar of its software — LabVIEW 8.5 — which addresses a new vision articulated by its co-founder-CEO, James Truchard: ‘To do for embedded design what the PC did for the desktop’.

The product development process has traditionally gone through three stages: design – prototype – deploy. Classic LabVIEW-type tools have successfully addressed the first challenge, design. Subsequent tool developments such as RIO – Realtime Input-Output programmable controllers – simplified the task of rapid prototyping. That still left the task of realising and embedding the design in a custom-built chip or an FPGA. A special FPGA module introduced in the new version of LabVIEW tries to address this last remaining activity in the product development cycle.

Made for Multi-core

Version 8.5 also recognises the reality of the new multi-core processor environment. In 2006, both Intel and AMD launched dual-core versions of their flagship desktop and server processors. Earlier this year, Intel went quad — and AMD is expected to follow before year end. Roadmaps of the major processor makers clearly indicate an almost annual doubling of the number of processor cores that will be accommodated on a single slab of silicon. Multiple cores on a chip will mean little — unless the application running on the PC is written to take advantage of these multiple programming paths: That means they must be optimised by splitting the task into parallel streams for simultaneous processing.

Only a handful of mainstream PC-based applications, mostly in the engineering design arena, were available in ‘hyperthreaded’ versions in the first months since multiple core PCs became available. Developers are scrambling to rewrite their applications into a job-sharing mode.

In Austin, NI touted the ‘inherent parallelism’ of LabVIEW to explain why multi-core and concurrent programming was no big deal for its customers. “Let LabVIEW deal with concurrency; it will dig out the parallelism in your programme, while you concentrate on its functional aspect,” said the Senior Vice-President for R&D, Tim Dehne.

The ‘Holy Grail’ of multi-core programming is to get a linear response to the number of cores. In lay language, that means if you have four cores instead of one on your processor chip, your task should run four times as fast. This has rarely been achievable — and even at launch events for the Intel multi core processor-based PCs, the claims have been for, at best, a 50 per cent performance improvement with typical applications.

At NIWeek, however, claims of ‘inherent parallelism’ were matched by a dramatic demonstration, where a fast fourier transform (FFT) application ran in exactly one-fourth the time when shifted from a single core machine to one fuelled by Intel’s Quad Core processor.

The ability to help realise rapid prototypes for a broad range of industrial applications has made NI’s virtual instrumentation hardware and software a popular choice with companies who cannot afford to go through a long costly cycle of conventional product development. And these recent applications have ranged from instrumentation to help run the world’s largest machine: the Large Hadron Collider or particle accelerator now under construction at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland, to cryogenically freezing cancerous breast tumours with Visica2, a non-surgical treatment developed by the California-based startup, Sanarus.

These applications, which use NI’s ‘CompactRIO’ family of Real-time Input-Output data acquisition modules, will experience a near-50 per cent reduction in instrumentation cost when the RIO family becomes available later this year, in a mass-produced single-board custom designers’ version from Flextronics, the global contract manufacturing agency.

Twisting the long tail

But the business of virtual instrumentation is rarely about mass-produced solutions. NI as a company has embraced the philosophy of the ‘Long Tail’ — a term coined by Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired magazine. His b estselling book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, explored the tremendous business potential of the long tail — the rise of the niche as a powerful new force in our economy. The ‘tail’ ; is a reference to the ‘power law’ distribution… a graph that drops sharply and flattens as it progresses along the ‘x’ axis. Anderson calls it the ‘shape of the twenty-first century’ : it shows that there is as much money to be made by selling small numbers of a very large range of products, as there is by selling large numbers of a very small range of goods. It is the philosophy of ‘one size fits one’ or in a curious way, an illustration of C.K. Prahalad’s famous dictum: “There’s room at the bottom of the pyramid.”

Thus, solution providers such as NI do not have to aim at a mass market for their offerings: but they do have to provide a very broad inventory of products, each one of which might sell in thousands rather than millions: You are likely to find a measurement module for the instrumentation you are creating — because dozens of third party suppliers have small-run products to offer. It might also explain why amidst the heavy duty applications that it supports, NI is also a key sponsor of events such as FLL — First Lego League — an annual international contest supported by US toymaker Lego and the non-profit FIRST, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, where nearly 90,000 school kids from over a dozen countries, including India, compete every year to work with the Mindstorms programmable robot for children and provide a solution to an announced problem. The challenge posed for the next contest that kicks off in September is: Meeting the global energy demand.

In Austin, on the sidelines of the main NI conference, dozens of student groups were already putting their Mindstorms through their paces, adding various sensor and measurement modules to make their robots walk, talk, sweep the floor or ride a bike. They did this while putting through its paces the new LabVIEW and its graphical programming tools. Skilfully integrating web cams and blue tooth dongles, position sensors and movement controllers, they made the business of product design seem like child’s play.

And in a strange way they seemed to be previewing a time when graphical design tools mature even more and transform the business of product design into what the Americans so tellingly call a ‘no brainer’.

Where Indians excel

Indian product developers bagged five of the 18 top awards for applications based on LabView tools, which were honoured at the annual NIWeek meet in Austin, Texas (US), on August 7.

The Bangalore-based automated solutions player Captronic Systems took the top spot for two innovations in Electronics/Electrical and Control, which it deployed for its client HAL, to test starter-generator sets and control hydraulic valves in an aircraft.

Another application, an event monitor and data acquisition system that distributes the computational load between multiple systems on a network, was cited for excellence in the aerospace sector.

From Chennai, Apna Technologies and Solutions, was honoured for its solution provided to Brakes India — a rapid in-vehicle anti-lock brake testing system as well as a system for Bharat Electronics to test vacuum tubes.

The top award of the event went to a group from Virginia Tech University for a robotic system to act as a platform for locomotion studies … that was put through its paces by making it play football!

The strong interest in LabVIEW as a development tool in India has seen it absorbed into the curriculum of many technology institutes.

The first Virtual Instrumentation lab was set up in IIT Kanpur in 1999 — and Professors Sanjay Gupta and Joseph John from that institution have authored the first book on the subject published for an Indian audience (“Virtual Instrumentation using LabVIEW.”).

A second book by Dr Ram Kalyan entitled “Control Engineering with LabVIEW” is due to be published later this year.

Dr Kalyan is with National Institute of Technology, Trichy.

Where Indians excel

Indian product developers bagged five of the 18 top awards for applications based on LabView tools, which were honoured at the annual NIWeek meet in Austin, Texas (US), on August 7.

Another application, an event monitor and data acquisition system that distributes the computational load between multiple systems on a network, was cited for excellence in the aerospace sector.

The strong interest in LabVIEW as a development tool in India has seen it absorbed into the curriculum of many technology institutes.

A second book by Dr Ram Kalyan entitled “Control Engineering with LabVIEW” is due to be published later this year.

Dr Kalyan is with National Institute of Technology, Trichy.

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Visual ways to product design