4 WAYS TO TEST SMARTER AND STAY AHEAD

Think about your past year as an engineer: How has your role changed? How about in the last five years? As the pace of change in technology continues to accelerate, you must adaptand create more efficiency in every aspect of your workplace.

This article shows you how to use the latest release of LabVIEW NXG to address the following four organizational challenges and quickly move on to your next engineering pursuit: 1. Reduce your test system setup and configura

tion time 2. Minimize the time to your next measurement 3. Increase test software collaboration 4. Put the right test data in front of the right

people

1. Test smarter by reducing your system setup and configuration time.

How much engineering time do you spend searching for the manual, the pinouts, the right hardware driver, the right utility, and so on?To help you test smarter, LabVIEW NXG now includes workflows that provide additional context and assistance with surfacing the right information at the right time. If the appropriate drivers are not yet installed on the machine, LabVIEW NXGprovides you with a guided experience to find and install the drivers without leaving the environment. Once the driver is installed, you can see the documentation, examples, and NI soft front panels to verify your setup and get initial measurements quickly.

To scale to larger setups, you can also configure the system in a table view, so you can efficiently batch edit configurations across instruments. These new capabilities aim to reduce the time you spendon common setup tasks, soyou can dedicate more time where it’s truly needed: acquiring results and custom-

Figure 2. Visually discover hardware, manage drivers, and configure settings without leaving the LabVIEW NXG environment. izing the system to meet your individual needs.

2. Test smarter by minimizing the time to your next measurement.

You musthave the flexibility to minimize the time to not just your first but also your next unknown test or measurement.Over the last 30 years, hundreds of thousands of engineers have used LabVIEW to increase their productivity through the abstraction ofinstrumentation tasks, and they have benefited from the intuitive functional view of graphical programming.

LabVIEW NXG builds on this graphical experience with engineering workflows that help you transition from hardware setup, initial measurements, and analysis to an efficient development environment. With LabVIEW NXG, you start at a higher level,and when you need more advanced analysis, logic, or automation, you can quickly build on top of the work you’ve already done.

3. Test smarter by increasing test software collaboration.

As part of NI’s continued commitment to test software, LabVIEW NXG and LabVIEW 2017, along with an increasing amount of other test and measurement software from NI, have been built on common, open-standard package technology. A new package manager enables you to distribute software—not just NI or third-party software, but also your own.

Increasing test collaboration and reuse relies on how you distribute software, whether that is with LabVIEW NXG, LabVIEW, or your own test code. Take the first step in standardization by distributing your software using industry-standard package building and package management technology so you can confidently replicate your systems.

4. Test smarter by putting the right test data in front of the right people.

Are you becoming a bottleneckof engineering data? If you’re a barrier to yourteam learning the status of tests in a timely manner, anda barrier to your own productivity because you can monitor only the one test in front of you, you are not alone. NIasked a group of test, measurement, and control engineers what they could do if theyhad remote access to theirtests.

The survey respondents saw the biggest impact of remote access on monitoring a test and/or accessing results. By using the web, engineers can take advantage of an accessible tool so entire teams can tap into

the data and gain additional visibility.

The LabVIEW NXG Web Module introduces dragand- drop creation tools for web-based interfaces ( WebVIs) to help you augment your test, measurement, control, and monitoring applications. You can use it to quickly create web-based engineering user interfaces, and, with its intuitive communication mechanismsand platform for secure hosting,you can rapidly develop and deploy your web interface without web programming expertise.

Evaluate How You Can Stay Ahead withTest Software

Test smarter byevaluating the software tools you are considering with these four key questions.How well does the software tool help you to: - tion time? - surement? people? What does your future hold? NI is excited to see the future faster through the exciting engineering challenges you will meetusing LabVIEW NXG.

Figure 3. Rapidly build and then iterate on your test and measurement system using the drag- and- drop design approach of LabVIEW NXG.

Figure 1. Reduceyour time to setup, automate and customize your test results with the latest release of LabVIEW NXG.

Figure 4. Distribute all the software you need to deploy and replicate a test system using the open, industrystandard package management that LabVIEW NXG provides.

Figure 5. Remotely monitoring and accessing data are the most common ways engineers would use web-based user interfaces in their next project, according to an NI survey.

Figure 6. Augment your test, measurement, control, and monitoring applicationswith web-based interfaces created with the LabVIEW NXG Web Module.

By Jonah Paul, Senior Product Marketing Manager, NI