ALARM

The Advanced LabVIEW Architects of the Rocky Mountains is a user group dedicated to our Colorado Front Range LabVIEW community. We meet quarterly at Colorado University and Colorado School of Mines.

We are a LabVIEW user's group in the pursuit of writing better LabVIEW code, networking with LabVIEW professionals and evaluating LabVIEW related technologies with National Instruments Sales Representatives, independent LabVIEW consultants, academics,  and regular employees and programmers of various Rocky Mountain based companies utilizing LabVIEW.

Our May 15th meeting had a great turnout and a lot of new faces! Thanks again to Dave and Laurel for organizing, and to NI for hosting. 

John Tyler gave a nice presentation on UML. The scope of UML is quite broad, and John did a great job of introducing the group to the concept, and even had us all participate in a hands-on execise in which we were given a problem, and encouraged to identify actors, develop use cases, and generate static and domain model diagrams. John also provided a veritable plethora of authors, books, and resources related to UML.  

Bill Brown demonstrated the problem of,  and offered code solution examples for distributing large state machines. He demonstraed how it is possible to hierarchically ditribute state machines across mutiple VIs (or even machines) while still maintaining a high level of cohesion. His technique involved using multiple queues for passing data and parameters back and forth between VIs. This included utilizing a cluster to house not only the enumerated type of the states for each state machine, but a variant componenet as well to be used for state parameters. Bill gave a highly effective demonstration on how to solve the real world problem of "my state machine is too big", which is sure to spark future discussions.

Stay tuned for our September 18th meeting agenda.....

National Instruments has always been a strong supporter of ALARM in many ways.  (In particular, thanks for all the pizza, NI!)  Recently, NI has implemented a new program to encourage even more participation of the LabVIEW community in various User Groups.  The NIWeek Rewards Program gives User Group presenters a discount for attending NIWeek in Austin, TX.  For each presentation a person makes at a User Group, NI will discount the registration cost of NIWeek by $250, up to four presentations, giving a person a potential savings of $1000!  Presentations given before July 31, 2008 can be applied to NIWeek this year, and presentations made after that time can be applied to NIWeek 2009.  For more information or to sign up to make a presentation, contact one of the ALARM organizers.  After making a presentation, contact Theresa Woodiel at NI to arrange for the discount (theresa.woodiel AT ni.com).