They come in numerous configurations and are located all over the world – our test benches for end-of-line testing of pneumatic components. Continuously refined over almost 30 years, all systems have one thing in common: NI DIAdem as the central software component, which not only provides the user interface but, above all, controls the test […]
It is widely said that measurement tasks are becoming increasingly complicated because the complexity of the systems under test is growing, whilst at the same time the demands regarding the information to be obtained are also rising. All of this is reflected in more channels, higher sampling rates and more complex functionality in measurement hardware […]
Most customer enquiries we receive regarding LabVIEW fieldbus communication relate to cyclic communication, i.e. the clock-synchronous exchange of process data, referred to as PDO (Process Data Object) in EtherCAT or CANopen. However, for performance reasons alone, by no means all parameters of bus devices are available for cyclic communication. In particular, parameter sets for complex […]
Although our main focus as an NI partner is naturally on NI hardware, at müller+krahmer – as specialists in fieldbuses and interfaces – we have extensive experience in integrating components from different manufacturers. Sometimes this requires in-depth knowledge of protocols and technologies as well as complex programming, as in the case of our LabVIEW libraries […]
It has been some time since our joint success story with Hilscher, “PC-based Automation with Unified Interfaces for all Formats and Protocols”, was published. In this article, we describe our solution for the multi-bus capability of end-of-line test benches for pneumatic valves at AVENTICS Laatzen. The application has undergone further development in the meantime, but […]
We hear everywhere that software developers no longer ‘code’ – instead, AI is taking over this task, and in future the human contribution to these services will consist solely of testing and verifying the resulting program code. For us, as developers of software solutions in test automation, this is also an issue that makes us […]
We often hear this from customers who operate their own LabVIEW (or DIAdem) solutions, or those created by third parties, on a PC running Windows. And we would say that an application exhibiting such behaviour does not, in principle, work properly. This is because such behaviour suggests fundamental errors in the software and means that […]
When developing our LabVIEW library for IO-Link, we actually had PC-based applications in mind, as the original interface solution was created as part of a complete solution for testing IO-Link devices. But when we were asked if we could also offer an IO-Link interface for compactRIO on this basis, we immediately said ‘yes’, because the […]
This was the title of the presentation that Manuel Hofmann from NI and I gave at NI Days 2026 in Munich. Manuel described the basic requirements for modern test solutions and showed how these can be met with the comprehensive NI ecosystem of hardware and software. Following this, I used the example of our end-of-line […]
The requirements for connecting devices to industrial buses are as varied as the tasks that can be solved with NI-PAC compactRIO. While the controller must be a bus master for connecting sensors and actuators, slave interfaces are usually easier to connect to an existing PLC. Control tasks require real-time behavior with low latency, while for […]