We’re doing 7x7s again this year

For those who don’t know, last year (inspired by the CLA Summits) we did a set of 7×7 presentations. 7 presenters. Each one gets 7 minutes. This is great showing off open-source projects or highlighting your favorite LabVIEW feature, or anything else that might be too short for a full presentation.

Here is a signup sheet
https://forms.gle/5qgJAgFsYpUapoLGA

You won’t get a free ticket just for doing a 7 x7 but you will get some token of appreciation.

Plan for a full day on Thursday

Last year we ended at midday on Thursday. We had a few optional afternoon social activities (like whitewater tubing). This year we had enough presentations and interest that we have a full day planned for Thursday. If you’ve already made travel arrangements, we apologize for the late notice. If you haven’t made travel arrangements yet, you will probably want to plan to stick around Thursday afternoon.

Congratulations to our Workshop Hosts

This year we are hosting a joint workshop with both DSH and SAS Workshops.

Sam was just awarded Consultant of the Year* at NI Connect, and Joerg and Steve were the runners up. It’s not often you’ll get the chance to get advice from the Consultant of the Year and both runners up. Don’t miss it. Make sure to add the workshop when purchasing tickets.

*techincally (as you can see on the slide) it is called the Consultant Impact Award, but it is the only award given to consultants and Nancy referred to it as Consultant of the year and that sounds much more impressive.

Updated Presentations List for 2023

Here is an updated list of presentations for 2023.

TitleAbstractPresenter
Everything But Occurrences: How and Why the DQMH Framework Utilizes (Almost) Every Single Synchronization API in LabVIEWDQMH is the world’s most popular 3rd-party framework for LabVIEW. One of its many benefits is the accessibility it provides to CLAD and CLD-level LabVIEW developers. And the framework is so accessible because most of the nuts and bolts of its operation are never even seen by module developers.

In this presentation we will pull back the curtain on how DQMH works under the hood, and in doing so, illustrate the ways in which events, queues, notifiers, semaphores, and yes, even rendezvous, facilitate all of the complex synchronization mechanisms that DQMH developers and users don’t even need to think about.
Darren Nattinger
Terrible API DesignAre you interested in annoying the people who will have to maintain your code after you get fired? This is the presentation for you. Learn how to avoid all the tricks that make code easy to use and understand. Using OO? You’ll learn a few anti-patterns that you should definitely start using all. the. time.Brian Powell
GIE Summer of LabVIEW Square Battle FinalsWe at the G Idea Exchange Committee are hosting a Square Battle competition this summer and are hoping to have the final battles live on stage at GDevCon N.A. We would give a brief overview of what the committee has been doing, where we’re going, what the Square Battle is and how we wanted to use it promote open source contributions. Then show the final battles giving commentary around them.Eric Schlieper and Casey May
Driven DevelopmentSoftware development processes govern all our lives. We all abide by some life cycle model, implicitly or explicitly. More than that, most probably we’re adopting multiple paradigms while working on our projects: We’re practice test-driven design when we think about testability, or we leverage behaviour-driven development to improve collaboration between project stake-holders. Sometimes, all at the same time.

There is a plethora of methodologies, and each one has its time and place, as they cater to specific aspects and facets of our projects. Just think about how different phases in our project call for different paradigms, and how we shift our focus from debugability (DDD) while commissioning a project to supportability (SDD) when we’re maintaining a project after acceptance and delivery to the customer.

This presentation gives an overview of available development paradigms, and draws a picture of how they are interconnected, how they augment each other, and how they can be mapped to different situations. The audience will participate in discussions. Beginners will take away a basic understanding of development models, and when to focus on which model depending on their situation. Advanced users get a chance to discuss and compare notes with peers and improve their way of working.
Steve Watts and Joerg Hampel
A HAL of a Good TimeReduce cost and enable engineering efficiency with a properly architected Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). A HAL supports parallel development, combats obsolescence, and increases reuse code. HAL creation should begin with a well architected design. Common design problems often arise during a HALs lifecycle. How do you handle it when your hardware goes obsolete? How do you handle it when different models have different features? How do you manage connections to devices? How should logging, debugging, and error handling be implemented? In this presentation we’ll offer solutions to these questions that can help combat those common problems and make your HAL, and test system, successful.Quentin Alldredge and Kevin Shirey
Introducing New Options for Motion Control Using LabVIEWAfter delivering over 50 axes of motion using LabVIEW since 1994, several years ago NI informed me that they would no longer support motion. Partnering with Trio Motion Technology providing motion controllers, I was able to develop new methods to deliver motion systems for my customers. In my presentation I will demonstrate using real hardware multiple methods to develop multi-axis stepper and servo systems using LabVIEW. I will also introduce the Trio Motion Toolkit that I developed that has been reviewed, certified and released by the NI Tools Network.
It is the intent of this presentation to make LabVIEW users, both beginners and seasoned professionals, comfortable delivering motion systems, even if they never developed one previously.
Eric Schaffer
The LabVIEW Experiment PanelHere’s your chance to ask the expert. We’ll put together a panel of experts on a topic TBD based on poll of the attendees . Sam Taggart host of the LabVIEW Experiment will be emcee. He’ll introduce the panelists, ask a few questions to set the stage and then open it up for audience questions. It will be recorded and put out as an episode of the LabVIEW Experiment.Sam Taggart
Standing on the shoulders of giants: Learning from Open SourceUsing open-source packages and tools is common in LabVIEW development. The presentation will encourage developers to explore the actual source code of the open-source resources they use or discover. It is a great way to learn techniques, style, and best practices. I will show examples of open-source tools and resources used in some of our projects, and I will demonstrate ways that exploring the code itself revealed new ways of solving problems to the team. As a bonus, by encouraging developers to examine the open-source code repositories, we hope to promote more contribution to those projects. The intermediate user might appreciate learning about some open-source projects, and the advanced user should notice how things like Test-Driven Development (TDD), unit tests, scripting, and calling other programming language libraries appear in the open-source world.Dan Press
A Class Act: Apply a Few Simple Design Patterns to Improve Your Code QualityWe’ve had access to object-oriented programming in LabVIEW since 2006, but not every application needs a fully realized object-oriented solution. For those that don’t, the judicious use of a few simple OO design patterns can simplify our work, improve modularity and testability, and deliver cleaner, more easily understood code, all while preserving the look and feel of “traditional” LabVIEW. We will draw on real-world solutions to explore the Template Method, the Factory, the Aggregator, and the State Pattern, and learn how those patterns evolve from and interact with traditional LabVIEW applications.Allen C Smith
Class-ical Composition in GShould your graph view inherit from a subpanel class or a window class? What about your force sensor state machine? You built inheritance for real sensors and simulated ones, but now you’re also being asked to offer different data reporting options. What if you want to mix and match, or alter all these behaviors on-the-fly?

In this presentation, we’ll explore how composition can elegantly solve these thorny problems, and get a preview of how the moZart tool could make composing in LabVIEW easier than ever.
Mike Le
Fun With Maker MCUs and LabVIEWHobby or maker micro-controllers exist within a broad and interesting landscape. This presentation will explore some of the possible ways to leverage these possibilities for use with LabVIEW. Some pros and cons of doing so will be discussed as well as several methods for accomplishing fun and possibly useful projects.Matthew Harrison
What would a G compiler in G look like?Come learn about software compiler technologies and how they relate to LabVIEW graphical dataflow (G) programs.Jim Kring
How LabVIEW Community Rocks: An Open Source Journey
Have you ever wondered how open source projects can help you learn and improve your LabVIEW skills? In this talk, I will share my experience of developing Panther Dashboard, a development tool for DQMH Projects. I will show you how I used various LabVIEW community resources, such as blogs, videos, forums and other open source projects, to get inspiration, guidance and feedback.

I will also explain how sharing your ideas and code with the LabVIEW community can benefit you and others. You can get valuable input from other LabVIEW experts, discover new ways of solving problems, and create something that meets the needs of your end users. You can also contribute to the growth and development of the LabVIEW ecosystem by giving back to the community.
Enrique Noe Arias
Dot Your I’s and Cross Your T’s in Your User InterfaceWhat items should be done to create a highly polished User Interface? In this presentation, I won’t be talking about color schemes or animations (like I usually do). Instead I cover all of the small nuances in LabVIEW to ensure your UI/UX is rock solid. I’ll elaborate on four simple rules to help create professional UIs. These rules are: 1) Prevent Instead of Warn, 2) Filter Features, 3) Simplify Navigation, and 4) KISS for UI. You’ll walk away from this presentation with a better knowledge of UIs to help make your applications safer, more intuitive, and more reliable.Quentin Alldredge
Chippin’ Away: Making a Big Roadblock into a Series of Smaller OnesIn Duke University’s Mechanical Engineering Department, we developed a tabletop ice surface to demonstrate collision mechanics as a teaching lab exercise. The intention was to mimic the ice surface used in the sport of curling and measure the position of colliding granite stones versus time. The surface was created using a chiller pumping a subzero ethylene glycol and water mixture through copper tubes sandwiched between aluminum plates. Data acquisition was done using a webcam mounted above the surface and LabVIEW Vision. My presentation would focus on how I tackled the data acquisition and LabVIEW development from start to finish. Starting with zero machine vision experience (and up until I began the project didn’t even know you could use a webcam in LabVIEW!), I’ll highlight the steps that I took to break down this larger problem into a series of smaller steps: can I take a still image? Can I take a video? Can I playback? Can I identify the same object through multiple frames of a video? Can I calibrate pixels to distance? Can I track multiple objects at once? I’ll also talk about the many ways that I failed along the way (why is it confusing my two objects??) before reaching the final application and the subsequent lessons learned. My approach was to play with each of these features in a “sandbox” before implementing them in the final application. At GDevConNA 2022, Katya Prince gave a fantastic presentation on machine vision. My presentation would echo similar points with regard to machine vision tips and tricks; however, I’d focus more on the problem-solving approach and hone into some of the lower level functions rather than use the Vision Assistant.Eric Stach

2023 Presentation Preview

We are very excited to announce a teaser of several of the presentations for GDevCon N.A. 2023.

We have quite a lineup in the works, covering a wide range of topics from DQMH, to motion control, to software development processes, to a live Summer of LabVIEW battle! Stay tuned in the next few weeks as we announce the rest of the presentations and the full schedule.

Presentation Abstracts

Joerg Hampel & Steve WattsDriven DevelopmentSoftware development processes govern all our lives. We all abide by some life cycle model, implicitly or explicitly. More than that, most probably we’re adopting multiple paradigms while working on our projects: We’re practice test-driven design when we think about testability, or we leverage behavior-driven development to improve collaboration between project stake-holders. Sometimes, all at the same time.

There is a plethora of methodologies, and each one has its time and place, as they cater to specific aspects and facets of our projects. Just think about how different phases in our project call for different paradigms, and how we shift our focus from debugability (DDD) while commissioning a project to supportability (SDD) when we’re maintaining a project after acceptance and delivery to the customer.

This presentation gives an overview of available development paradigms, and draws a picture of how they are interconnected, how they augment each other, and how they can be mapped to different situations. The audience will participate in discussions. Beginners will take away a basic understanding of development models, and when to focus on which model depending on their situation. Advanced users get a chance to discuss and compare notes with peers and improve their way of working.
Matthew HarrisonFun With Maker MCUs and LabVIEWHobby or maker micro-controllers exist within a broad and interesting landscape. This presentation will explore some of the possible ways to leverage these possibilities for use with LabVIEW. Some pros and cons of doing so will be discussed as well as several methods for accomplishing fun and possibly useful projects.
Mike LeClass-ical Composition in GShould your graph view inherit from a subpanel class or a window class? What about your force sensor state machine? You built inheritance for real sensors and simulated ones, but now you’re also being asked to offer different data reporting options. What if you want to mix and match, or alter all these behaviors on-the-fly?

In this presentation, we’ll explore how composition can elegantly solve these thorny problems, and get a preview of how the moZart tool could make composing in LabVIEW easier than ever.
Darren Nattinger & Fabiola De la CuevaEverything But Occurrences: How and Why the DQMH Framework Utilizes (Almost) Every Single Synchronization API in LabVIEWDQMH is the world’s most popular 3rd-party framework for LabVIEW. One of its many benefits is the accessibility it provides to CLAD and CLD-level LabVIEW developers. And the framework is so accessible because most of the nuts and bolts of its operation are never even seen by module developers.

In this presentation we will pull back the curtain on how DQMH works under the hood, and in doing so, illustrate the ways in which events, queues, notifiers, semaphores, and yes, even rendezvous, facilitate all of the complex synchronization mechanisms that DQMH developers and users don’t even need to think about.
Brian PowellTerrible API DesignAre you interested in annoying the people who will have to maintain your code after you get fired? This is the presentation for you. Learn how to avoid all the tricks that make code easy to use and understand. Using OO? You’ll learn a few anti-patterns that you should definitely start using all. the. time.
Daniel PressStanding on the shoulders of giants: Learning from Open SourceUsing open-source packages and tools is common in LabVIEW development. The presentation will encourage developers to explore the actual source code of the open-source resources they use or discover. It is a great way to learn techniques, style, and best practices. I will show examples of open-source tools and resources used in some of our projects, and I will demonstrate ways that exploring the code itself revealed new ways of solving problems to the team. As a bonus, by encouraging developers to examine the open-source code repositories, we hope to promote more contribution to those projects. The intermediate user might appreciate learning about some open-source projects, and the advanced user should notice how things like Test-Driven Development (TDD), unit tests, scripting, and calling other programming language libraries appear in the open-source world.
Eric SchafferIntroducing New Options for Motion Control Using LabVIEWAfter delivering over 50 axes of motion using LabVIEW since 1994, several years ago NI informed me that they would no longer support motion. Partnering with Trio Motion Technology providing motion controllers, I was able to develop new methods to deliver motion systems for my customers. In my presentation I will demonstrate using real hardware multiple methods to develop multi-axis stepper and servo systems using LabVIEW. I will also introduce the Trio Motion Toolkit that I developed that has been reviewed, certified and released by the NI Tools Network. It is the intent of this presentation to make LabVIEW users, both beginners and seasoned professionals, comfortable delivering motion systems, even if they never developed one previously.
G Idea ExchangeGIE Summer of LabVIEW Square Battle FinalsThe G Idea Exchange Committee is hosting a Square Battle competition this summer and the final battle will be live on stage at GDevCon N.A!
2023 Presentation Preview

Got tickets?

If you want to check out all these presentations, make sure you get your tickets before they sell out!

The window for early bird pricing has ended, but there are a few days left to get your name in to the raffle for a free GDevCon N.A. ticket offered by Binary Palette!

We’d love to see you present!

The deadline to submit your proposal (abstract) to present at GDevCon N.A. is April 30th. (Less than a week away!)

We have already received quite a few very exciting proposals and are anticipating an amazing lineup – but there is still room for your original, engaging presentation to make the list! For inspiration, check out presentations from previous years of GDevCon NA and GDevCon.

We love presentations that are:

  • original
  • promote learning and collaboration
  • use real-world examples
  • are engaging to a wide audience

Take a look at our values and presentations page for more details on what kind of content we are looking for.

If you or your company are also considering becoming sponsors of GDevCon N.A., it isn’t too late! Sponsorship is critical to the success of the conference and we are very grateful for every sponsor who has supported us this year so far, and in previous years.

We can’t wait to hear from you!

Future Presenters – This could be you!

Now Calling all Future GDevCon N.A. Presenters!

The stage at GDevCon N.A. is a great place to share your original content with the G community. This is an amazing, welcoming community with an active social presence. We are now accepting submissions for presentations and will be until April 30th.

We love presentations that are:

  • original
  • promote learning and collaboration
  • use real-world examples
  • are engaging to a wide audience

Take a look at our values and presentations page for more details on what kind of content we are looking for. Also don’t forget to check out the GDevCon NA YouTube channel for examples of excellent presentations from 2021 and 2022.

We are also actively seeking GDevCon NA sponsorships for 2023. There are many perks to sponsorship- check out our sponsor call-outs on GDevCon NA’s LinkedIn posts, and our sponsor highlight page.

Looking forward to an amazing third year!

Early Bird Ticket Sales Open

We are excited to announce that we have opened early bird ticket sales for GDevCon N.A. 2023! Grab your seats now at the early bird discounted rate.

GDevCon NA will once again consist of two and a half days of excellent content from Tuesday, July 18th to Thursday, July 20th. Stay tuned for more details about the workshop and special events we have in the works for July 17th and July 21st, and for details on how to participate in those events.

We are actively seeking sponsors, vendors, and presenters for this year’s conference. There are some great benefits to becoming a sponsor or taking the stage as a presenter. Stay tuned as our call for presentations is coming soon! And, if you or your organization are interested in sponsoring, check out the link below: