National Instruments (NI), the provider of systems that enable engineers and scientists to solve the world’s greatest engineering challenges, successfully hosted the 13th edition of NIDays – an annual conference on graphical system design – in Bangalore. The event was attended by over 500 engineers, scientists, and experts from Industry and Academia who discussed the trends, opportunities and challenges that lie in the future of connected systems.
At the seminar, NI India launched the latest version of its flagship product, LabVIEW 2016, with enhancements in acquiring, processing and managing data from remote data acquisition systems. NIDays offered 21 technical sessions and tutorials along with a wide range of products and application demonstrations. Speakers and exhibitors from various industries joined the event. The diverse set of panellists shared their ideas on trends in communication systems, embedded electronics, security and automated test systems that address the challenges and opportunities for the next generation of connected systems.
Addressing the media at the event, Jayaram Pillai, Managing Director – National Instruments, said
Over the last 18 years in India, we have built a strong ecosystem of partners, proficient developers and successful customers and this ecosystem has enabled our customers to innovate. It’s inspiring to see the amount of innovation and true technological advancements at this year’s NIDays. The continuous dedication and leadership I’ve seen from the engineering community is awe-inspiring and I’m excited for the future of engineering.
Commenting on the success of the event, Ajit Gokhale, Senior VP Global Marketing, National Instruments, said
As the world becomes more and more connected, the immense amount of data available today provides the engineers and scientists with a wide variety of insights, but getting the right insight can be a challenge! We continue to help our customers stay ahead of the curve through our platform-based approach and cutting-edge technology advances in application areas such as the Internet of Things (IoT) or the development of 5G networks by creating tools that help engineers solve real world challenges, accurately, efficiently and rapidly.
NI’s tools have proven to be instrumental in the success of a lot of Indian customers and their applications. This year, NI added various new products to the list of these tools aimed at accelerating the productivity of engineers and researchers working in the areas of IoT, 5G, industrial automation, etc. Some of these tools enable applications that previously seemed too ambitious because of their complexities.
The new range of products launched at the event includes:
- High-performance PXI instrumentation for processing and sensing at the edge
- MIMO Application Framework which provides wireless researchers with a fully open reference solution to accelerate 5G prototyping
- Early access technology platform for TSN which delivers mechanisms to create distributed, synchronized, hard real-time systems over standard Ethernet
- NI Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) Simulator which helps drive down the cost of test for customers
- Software-centric NI PXI Digital Pattern Instrument used by semiconductor characterization and production test engineers to drive down the cost of their tests and ensure product quality
To accelerate engineering skills development in India, NI also hosted its annual Engineering Impact Awards 2016 aimed at recognizing the most innovative projects based on NI software and hardware and NIYANTRA awards 2016 recognizing the best graphical system design created by budding engineering students.
Engineering Impact Awards
NI’s annual technical application contest – Engineering Impact Awards, enabled NI customers to showcase innovative projects based on NI software and hardware. The contest this year had a total of 40 teams and the winners got a chance to participate in the Global Engineering Impact Awards held in Austin annually during NIWeek.
This year, Captronics won in the ‘Application of the Year’ and ‘NI Alliance Partner of the year’ categories. They developed an application to determine the location of a bullet on a target system using NI CompactRIO Platform. National Aerospace Laboratories won in the ‘Systems Category’ for their design and development of structural health monitoring system comprising of SyncVIEW, DiagnoseVIEW, QuickVIEW for aircraft composite structures. Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad won in the ‘Academic Category’ for developing a closed loop control of three phase inverter voltage using NI LabVIEW FPGA and cRIO.
Niyantara Awards
In order to foster the spirit of innovation in engineering students and expose them to the essence of experiential education through a contest, NI hosted its annual student design contest NIYantra 2016. This contest, held over a period of six months, helped the undergraduate engineers design their project ideas and convert them into working models using NI hardware and software.
This year, NIYantra 2016 witnessed submissions from more than 950+ teams, out of which 18 teams made it to the finals. The results of the competition were announced at NIDays 2016. Sri Eshwar College of Engineering won the NIYANTRA 2016 awards for creating an innovative path detector designed for visually challenged. Teams from Vivekanand Education Society’s Institute Of Technology and K.J. Somaiya College of Engineering were the runners-up. The team from Kumaraguru College of Technology was also recognized for their efforts.