William Wong
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ED Online ID #13267 |
August 10, 2006
National Instrument’s annual NI Week at its home city of Austin was cooler than last year both inside the convention center and without (although it was still hot and humid). There were some major announcements from National Instruments (NI) and also Lego at this year’s event. One reason for all the hoopla is NI’s 30th anniversary. Definitely seems like a good thing to celebrate. The other is the 20th anniversary of LabVIEW, NI’s main software product and the centerpiece of its hardware product line as well. A little more on the LabVIEW announcement later including one of the newest enhancements, object oriented programming support.
I’m only through the beginning of the show but I did get to see a few things from Oki Semiconductor and Analog Devices but first the fun stuff. Robots!
Bring In The Robots The Mindstorms NXT is the latest Mindstorm product from Lego. The control unit contains a 32-bit ARM7 microcontroller with 256 kbytes of flash memory and 64 kbytes of RAM. There is also an 8-bit AVR microcontroller with 4 kbytes of flash and 512 bytes of RAM for peripheral control. Communication support includes Bluetooth wireless and full speed USB (12 Mbit/s). The box has four 6-wire input ports and 3 output ports. IO includes a 100 by 64 pixel LCD graphical display and a loudspeaker. The unit is powered by 6 AA batteries. Of course, the NI LabVIEW is the underpinnings to the software that comes with the NXT.
It is possible to build a range of robots using the NXT kit like this upright robot (see Figure 1) and this one for grasping at straws (see Figure 2). These mobile robots are a far cry from the super bot shown in the Lego commercial where it played soccer with a tag line where NXT can be used to build a robot that will build “almost” what you can dream of. Still, the commercial and the NXT is bound to garner attention and inspire robotic experts to be. Overall it was an impressive announcement. I was hoping to get a movie of the scorpion (see Figure 3) that will attack anything put in front of it so you will have to be satisfied with this rotating image detection system (see Figure 4) that shows you don’t have to just build up robots using NXT. [[Click here to see video]]
I’ll have more on the software and the LabVIEW Toolkit for Lego Mindstorms NXT in a few weeks after I have had my hands on the kit for awhile. The standard software uses a graphical interface similar to Labview but significantly simpler and designed for robot control. The LabVIEW Toolkit provides more sophisticated developers with the tools to do just about anything with the NXT. Lego also announced an open source firmware developer kit as well providing yet another way to exercise these little plastic blocks.
20 Years Yields Object-Oriented Programming? LabVIEW 8.20 was clearly the centerpiece for almost all the presentations at NI Week. This version of LabVIEW has a host of enhancements and Lou Frenzel will have an article posted cover many of these. I’ll be doing another soon on the new software architectural enhancement: object oriented programming (OOP).
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