You gotta hand it to National Instruments for promoting and leveraging their products globally in all possible applications where signals need control and have to be measured.
At its annual Graphical System Design Achievement Awards event last week more than 120 submissions from authors in 20 countries were submitted. A judging committee of NI technical experts reviewed the papers and selected the contest finalists and winners.
In the Education category two examples stood out and show how universities are using NI hardware and software to provide students with hands-on learning opportunities in the classroom.
The winner in the education category was: Creating a Real-Time Simulator for Power Quality Signals. The entry was also the recipient of NI Community's Choice Award. The finalist was Measuring and Analyzing the Effects of Waves in an Experimental Basin Using PXI Express.
The winner’s entry was from University of the Andes in Columbia which has set up a program to simulate real-world situations to teach electrical engineering students how to measure power signals. They created a system using Labview software and CompactRIO hardware that includes power quality (PQ) generation algorithms.
They selected the NI cRIO-9082 controller with an Intel Core i7 main processor to run the OS and the programmed tasks using. Although the hardware works with the Labview real-time OS, the university lab created an embedded OS using Windows 7 that enables the user to program directly in the real-time hardware to achieve more autonomy for the programming and debugging process.
You can view the category winners and finalists and read their papers here.