The Internet is bringing even more things together lately—off the plant floor and on—and consumers and engineers need help organizing and analyzing all the data coming in. Even their machines and other equipment are gaining web presences and communicating via the ballooning Internet of Things (IoT), but they often need as much aid as their human counterparts.
Luckily, a few developers and organizations have the tools to manage these incoming data sources and use their information to make better decisions. One of these is National Instruments (www.ni.com), which showcased many of its end users and solutions for more than 3,000 attendees at its 20th annual NI Week, Aug. 5-8, in Austin, Texas.
"What we've been working over the last several decades is now converging to give us a definitive, differentiated position in the area of big analog data and high-performance, mixed-signal test," said Dr. James Truchard, NI's president, CEO and co-founder. "In this era of big analog data, it's possible to capture your data over time and turn it into useful information and ultimately into wisdom. That's what we see as a convergence of social media, analytics and cloud computing to make it possible for us to truly transform the way enterprises work."
Truchard reported that NI divides IoT into industrial IoT and consumer IoT, and this industrial side is focused on using big analog data, analytics, distributed timing and synchronization, and intelligence via cyber-physical systems to help factories, power grids, cities and machines work better.
End-user solutions presented at NI Week included:
Dr. James Truchard, president, CEO and co-founder of National Instruments
Subaru's parent, Fuji Heavy Industries, employs NI's hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) platform to simulate and test its first hybrid car, the XV Crosstrek, before committing to costly, time-consuming real-world tests. "We reduced overall test time and optimized time to market because all the test patterns ran automatically in only 118 hours," explained Tomohiro Morita, senior engineer in the HEV design department in Fuji's Subaru Engineering division. "This was a 94% reduction in test time compared to manual testing."
