NI Automotive Solutions Conference 2008

On Thursday November 13, National Instruments hosted their annual Automotive Solutions Conference at the Novotel Glen Waverley in Melbourne. The event was well attended, with people representing a variety of companies involved in automotive testing as well as university researchers and students.

The day's keynote presentation was given by Matej Krajnc, Managing Director of National Instruments Oceania, who highlighted the expansion of virtual instrumentation in test and measurement within the automotive industry and its increasing complexity as tested products gain more features and functionality. As a result, in the current economic climate, the need to develop complex systems faster and cheaper is more important than ever before.

National Instruments engineers Karthik Vilvanathan and Dmitry Goncharov presented new technologies and tools that NI has recently made available to assist in the design and testing of the complex automotive test systems, including CAN modules and the new GPS toolkit. Also presented were the new features of LabVIEW 8.6 which many in the audience were impressed by.

Also on the agenda were guest presentations by:

• John Payne of Niksar Australia: Engine Harness Tester. John detailed Niksar’s in-line engine harness test system which was capable of performing up to 60 separate tests in a strict five second window on up to 17 different variants.


• Nathan Vaidyanathan of Industrial Research Technology: Functional Testing of Bluetooth Modules. Nathan gave an interesting in-depth description on how one might go about automating the testing of bluetooth devices.


• Chris Farmer of CPE Systems: Automotive Applications with LabVIEW. Chris detailed the product design process and interspersed it with a variety of examples of CPE automotive industry projects demonstrating each step of the design process.