National Instruments (NI) South Africa recently hosted its annual measurement and automation conference, the National Instruments Technical Symposium 2004, at two separate venues in South Africa. The company presented these complementary, full-day symposiums in Cape Town on 24 November, and in Midrand on 26 November 2004.
Primary highlights at this year's events included technical presentations given by engineers from the company's corporate headquarters in Austin, Texas, as well as local leading users of virtual instrumentation in South Africa.
NI South Africa branch manager, Michael Hutton, gave the keynote presentation at the symposiums. This session reflected on some of the applications that have been worked on locally, and how they have impacted users since the branch's inception four years ago. He also discussed future technology trends within the measurement and automation industry, and National Instruments' aim to continue to bring these to benefit the user. In addition to the keynote presentation, Hutton presented a session focusing on building rugged industrial machine control systems with CompactRIO.
Andres Salvador-Stamm, NI International sales manager, heading up Latin America, South Africa and Canada, gave a presentation on creating handheld measuring systems with LabVIEW.
Tim Fountain, NI Hardware Product Strategy Manager for Instrument Control, presented a session focusing on PXI and LabVIEW for Test, Control and Design applications. Fountain also demonstrated LabVIEW FPGA and explained how to build a simple application, discussing some practical real-world customer applications.
Morten Jensen, with the NI Consulting Services Group, presented sessions focusing on LabVIEW control design and simulation tools. He explored the new NI LabVIEW tools for system identification, control design, and simulation, demonstrating new tools available to build custom control algorithms, from standard PID control algorithms to complex control algorithms, and how these tools can be used with existing NI hardware and software, such as LabVIEW Real-Time, to implement realtime control systems.
Shurlok International's presentation focused on the development of an automated test bench for testing electronic modules used in the BMW 3 Series; IST Industrial discussed a loose-parts monitoring system for Eskom Koeberg Nuclear Power Station; TLC Software spoke about the measurement and analysis of electrical power; and the University of Pretoria gave a presentation about the National Instruments Educational Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Suite (NI ELVIS) in computer modelling and simulation.
"Our technical symposiums have rounded off another very successful year for National Instruments South Africa. We are extremely pleased about the fact that these technical symposiums attracted a 20% growth in registrations over the conferences which took place in 2003, and we would like to extend our thanks to all the guest presenters for their valuable contributions in making the symposiums the success they were," commented Michael Hutton. National Instruments' local toll-free number is 0800 203 199.
For more information contact Michael Hutton, National instruments SA, 011 805 8197, ni.southafrica@ni.com, www.ni.com/southafrica
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