In late February, I started a new job in a development position at National Instruments. It’s been a pleasure to work at a tech company that actually has a proven business model, is large and stable, yet still has an entrepreneurial feel to it. Anyway, I’m not there even two weeks, I think, when I start seeing flyers all over the place regarding an Arduino contest. Basically, NI is developing an Arduino driver for its LabVIEW graphical programming environment, and they’re challenging people to come up with concepts for how to use Arduino/LabVIEW to do something fun or cool. The top ten submitters win a free Uno and a $50 gift certificate to sparkfun.com. Fun concepts for Arduino!!?? Seriously, how awesome is that!?
I’d had absolutely zero experience with LabVIEW at that point, but I figured I should be able to pick it up pretty quick (turns out it is very similar, conceptually, to Vignette’s VBiz tool) and whipping together a project where I use LabVIEW to drive the meshed-network light suits should be a shoe-in. I can always use some $$ to spend at Sparkfun! So, I ginned up a Powerpoint presentation and submitted it. Sure enough, I was chosen as one of the ten and was thereby committed to learning LabVIEW.
I’ll update this blog entry shortly with the results of my endeavor.
Since the point of the contest is to generate some excitement about the interface, we’re required to submit a brief video of our project. Mine is here.
Your powerpoint link is broken. Congrats! on getting picked for Sparkfun
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