Review of National Instruments VirtualBench----make money online

I recently came across this interesting

piece of test equipment at a convention

and I asked National Instruments to send

me a loaner models that I could play

with it a bit more and show you guys as

well so they did but I'm not receiving

any compensation for this review and I'm

also not going to charge patreon users

for this video just to keep it as

conflict-free as possible so let's talk

about what this thing actually is this

is called the National Instruments

virtual bench and it's a whole bunch of

instruments crammed into this fairly

compact unit so it's got a two channel

oscilloscope it's 100 megahertz

bandwidth with a Giga sample sampling

rate if you're using both channels it's

500 Meg for if you're doing both

channels at the same time it's got a

function generator 14 bit DAC which is

capable of arbitrary waveforms but only

through the programming interface when

you're using the bundled application

with this thing which we'll talk about

in a minute it's a you know your

standard square sine and triangle waves

it has a five and a half digit

multimeter and it comes with standard

probes like this and it's capable of

measuring up to 10 amps it's also got an

integrated power supply so it has a six

volt 1 amp supply which is fully

programmable and also a plus 25 and a

negative 25 volt supply at half an amp

each and then the most interesting part

the best for last it has this digital

i/o connector and it has eight channels

that you can control and even send bus

protocols in and out so spy and I

squared C can be read or written through

this port I almost forgot it also has a

34 channel logic analyzer built into it

so it's a mixed mode oscilloscope there

are two main ways to interact with this

piece of equipment you can use the

bundled application that National

Instruments provides with it and that

runs on either an iPad or on Windows and

it allows you to control all the

instruments through manual drop menus in

in the software which I'll show and of

course it's a PC based oscilloscope

however you can also control it

programmatically through LabVIEW or

through C and National Instruments

provides a C library and some example

code so the reason that I'm most

interested in this

equipment is that you can do things like

monitor the current through the power

supply at the same time you're sending

and receiving spy commands through the

digital port at the same time that

you're using the oscilloscope to

actually measure higher speed signals so

this whole unit here can function as a

standalone test bench where you could

put a sensor in front of it and power

the sensor through the power supply

check how much currents it's drawing

very the voltage up and down interact

with the sensor through the digital

stuff and measure you know the analog if

you've got an analog sensor I can see a

few applications where this piece of

equipment would be especially suited so

for example at the end of an assembly

line if you want to test the boards

coming off the wine you basically got

everything you could pretty much ever

want here with the power supply included

and all the other things that I

mentioned you could put the board in

your test jig and have this thing run

through a bunch of tests

programmatically you could simulate a

dying battery you could simulate a

reverse battery you can manually

simulate button presses through the

digital controls and so on and since

it's all being controlled through that

view or C programming you can write a

test procedure basically a state machine

or whatever you want and the assembly

line worker only has to interact with a

very clean interface basically just hit

go and the thing could run through all

the tests I think it's also very

well-suited for testing sensors

basically functioning as a data logger

and so your sensor might be I squared C

or spy and collecting that data through

a benchtop instrument is actually fairly

difficult especially if you have to

program the device like if you have to

send a spy command and then read the

data with LabVIEW especially you can

collect all of this and then even plot

it over time so if you're if you want to

trial a temperature sensor for an

upcoming design or something and the

temperature sensor speaks spy you'd be

great to have this thing just run all

day long and make sure that it's stable

and watched the temperature variation

over time just to make sure the sensor

is working the way you want I should

also mention the device has two

interfaces for the computer connection

it's got a USB and then it also has a

Wi-Fi a wireless connection

and and I did a pretty cool job of

designing the Wi-Fi this can act as a

network host so you can tell this thing

to start a wireless network and then you

can connect to it from your computer

without adding like another router to it

also handy if your work situation has

like a corporate network and you don't

want to connect to it because this isn't

you know certified piece of equipment

you can tell it to start its own Wi-Fi

and get around it that way there's also

the possibility of putting this thing on

a device that is moving for example a

robot and if you power this with like a

car battery and inverter you can

actually send you know communicate with

this thing over the Wi-Fi and even

control the robot through LabVIEW and

you know through the digital controls

and collect data all at the same time so

there's quite a few applications where I

think sort of data logging and sensor

interfaces where this thing is most

appropriate the instrument costs $2,000

and if you'd like LabVIEW on top of that

that's an extra thousand all right so

let's try some tests with it so I have

it hooked up to a milligram balance that

I've hacked and internally there's a spy

bus in here that I've brought out to a

connector and I'm probing the spy bus

with the two analog channels so let's

take a look at the bundled app that

comes with it here's the Windows

application you can see at the top we've

got sort of a zoomed out view of the two

traces and we've got some time-based

controls up here you can also change the

time base by using the mouse wheel

here's the set up for the channels I

think that the interface is a little too

plain like for example if you want to

change something with channel one

there's no actual controls there until

you hover over it and there's this tiny

little 3 dot menu that pulls up the

actual coupling controls for channel 1

they probably ran out of screen real

estate but I think they made a little

bit too big of an effort to hide the

controls over here we've got the

function generator set up it's got quite

a voltage range it goes from negative 12

12 to 12 volts as you can see in the app

control it's just the three waveforms

that we have a triangle wave square wave

or sine wave down here we've got the

multimeter controls and you can select

what you want to measure

with the buttons here here we have a

control for the power supply so this

button here turns on all three supplies

I don't believe they can be turned on

and off individually but you can set the

voltages individually I forgot to

mention that the 25 volt supplies are

programmable just like the six volt

supply so you can either use the up/down

keys to select a voltage or of course

you can just type in whatever you want

this corner has the digital i/o control

and so again if we press this small menu

button we can select some of these lines

to be outputs so for example 1 and 2 can

be outputs and then by clicking on the

toggle button that it just created we

can change the digital state of those

i/o lines and it's a 3.3 volt output I

believe they're 5 volt tolerant I think

in the documentation it says that it can

take up to 5 volts and they're protected

against higher voltages but you really

shouldn't go above 5 it also has fairly

basic oscilloscope functionality so it's

got a measurement menu where you can add

these measurements to the current screen

and it's already showing the frequency

of channel 1 and so on it's also got a

standard cursors menu so we can do some

time cursors and probably the one thing

that I like better about having this

interface is that it's easier to

position cursors on the waveform this is

a little bit can use the mouse wheel to

kind of scroll in and out and then the

cursor can be positioned a little bit

more easily right over the wave so as

you might have guessed I'm not a huge

fan of PC based oscilloscopes it has

some of these sort of nice features

where you can you know drag things

around but for example they they always

seem to lack something for example if

you you know drag this it doesn't redraw

for some strange reason you have to let

the button up for it to redraw so if you

actually want to inspect a signal that's

quite long you know this thing stores

about a million points I think for a

record so as you can see in the top

trace there's this falling edge that's

quite a bit ahead so we can drag over to

look at it but we have to let the button

up to see it so if you're actually

looking for glitches or something and

you're dragging this thing along hoping

to see them you

we'll another strange thing is that the

zoom level is tied to the time base so

if i zoom in it's actually changing the

time base as i zoom in but you may not

want to do that you may want to keep the

time base fixed and then just move your

zoomed in window around within the

waveform actually let me try a single

and see now see even if it's a single

even if the acquisition is already done

it still doesn't redraw so that actually

is a bug that they might be able to fix

it does have a slightly more advanced

triggering so you can trigger on a

pattern and then again press this tiny

little button and it comes up with

digital lines that have to be in a

certain state for it to trigger I don't

believe that it can trigger off of spy

or I squared C messages though I also

don't see a more complex single line

trigger so for example a pulse and then

a delay or a missing pulse trigger I

don't see anything like that and I

haven't read anything that indicates it

can do that there is hope though I think

that ni is spending quite a bit of time

updating this app and so I squared C and

spy functionality was just added to that

8 line digital i/o connector fairly

recently so they are putting effort into

adding features to this and they've made

a few claims on their website saying

that those features will be given away

for free which is actually pretty cool

so the spy and I squared C decoding on a

typical oscilloscope would cost you know

a thousand dollars from the big three

but these guys have included it as a

totally free update with the virtual

bench which is quite nice ok I've

connected the milligram balance up to

the digital input lines and also connect

this analog oscilloscope line back to

the function generator so you can see

you know pull the function generator

offset up-and-down and amplitude up and

down it works pretty well just to show

you how you might set up a trigger on

this thing we come over to trigger and

change this to channel 1 and then we can

pull the trigger level down like this so

I have to admit that you know for some

things using a graphical interface like

this is better on a PC oscilloscope but

overall I still feel like it's kind of

like driving a car with your windshield

completely fogged up

it's you can do it but you're probably

going to miss something and it's it's

really better just to clear it off

having like a digital phosphor effect

and a really fast update and really fast

responding knobs is probably the best

way to look at a signal with which

you're unfamiliar and you're probably

unfamiliar with it because you're using

an oscilloscope to look at it anyway

okay so let's turn on these digital

control lines and see what we can see so

we're going to add a spy bus and we're

not going to use chip select and I found

out that you can if you say always

active it just disables the chip select

line and it doesn't it's not decoding

anything because the bus isn't set up

quite right just yet but if we expand

the bus it should show us the digital

lines and I was expecting to see

something there ah no trigger so we'll

change the trigger to trigger on d0 and

we may as well turn off this analog line

kind of funny you can drag the bus

around it snaps back to the top so I

guess that's kind of its preferred

location and I don't see any way of

making these any larger but anyway we'll

just we'll just go with it here okay so

the clock is d1 now the day the line is

d0 that's MSB first we're going to go on

the rising edge of the clock and then we

can set the word size quite large this

is actually pretty cool it goes all the

way up to 32 which we're going to use

and we should be decoding oh and then

we'll set the idle time so there's a

long time between these 32 bit pulses so

I'm just going to set this to one

millisecond and as you can see it's

decoding the data up there in real time

which is good as you can see this

protocol is a little strange and so this

first block of eight bits is used as

like a control setting and it's not

changing with the weight applied to the

scale and then the next three sets of

eight bits are the actual data from the

load sensor and you can see it floating

around here because it's such a

sensitive balance and then these last

eight

aren't used either so lucky for us the

scope will start decoding here and then

32 bits later is the end of the data so

we're actually getting we would actually

like to just decode these middle 24 and

that's very hard to set up without chip

select so my opinion is that it's good

for a PC oscilloscope but it's still a

PC oscilloscope it doesn't bother me

very much though because I think that

this device is really best suited for

data logging and sensor integration so

let's talk a bit more about what it can

do with programmatic control for this

test I've got a standard one end four

thousand four diode forward biased

across one of the twenty five volt

supplies and then I've also got the

scope hooked up just to monitor the

voltage across the diode this is the

evaluation version of LabVIEW 2014 and

if you aren't familiar with LabVIEW let

me give you the thirty second

explanation the idea is that you're

building a virtual instrument and the

this window shows how the instrument is

wired and so you can have different

modules and each one of these modules

does something like controls the voltage

coming out of the actual virtual bench

that's sitting on the bench here and

then the other half of this is the front

panel of this instrument that you're

creating so some of these controls are

like a drop box and that actually forms

a control that the user can manipulate

on this front panel so think of it as

putting together an instrument for

someone else to use although that

someone else could be you yourself it's

just a easy way to operate your program

through this graphical interface I'm a

pretty big fan of it I know that people

have different opinions but it's it's

very fast it's sometimes limiting and so

people that would prefer to program in

Python or C would cite that it's you

know it's too limiting for what they do

but in terms of speed and getting stuff

ready fast it is quite good for that

especially for data acquisition and

analysis this is an example virtual

instrument that I downloaded from ni and

modify it a little bit and the purpose

it's got some headers below here to tell

you what's going on

so this first block initializes the

instrument it takes a name you might

have multiple virtual benches connected

your computers so this thing actually

queries the user for which one you want

to connect to

and you can see the list only has one

because I've only got one connected I'm

not going to go into detail about how to

program in LabVIEW but you can sort of

think of this as flowing from left to

right so the next thing that happens is

it queries the user for a power supply

channel and on the front panel it shows

up here and we're going to choose the

plus 25 volt Channel and then all these

other inputs are drop boxes or text

number entries here so the start voltage

is going to be 0 volts the current limit

is going to be hundred milliamps the end

voltage is going to be 1 volt and the

number of steps is going to be a hundred

so what this whole thing is going to do

is going to program that 25 volt power

supply to start out at zero and work its

way up to one volt in a hundred steps

and as it goes along it's going to

measure the current and voltage and then

show them on a graph so we will press

the Run button as you can see this is

the current versus voltage curve for

that diode and as you would expect at

about point six volts because it's a

silicon device it starts to conduct but

you can see here the it's at point 6

volts it's only flowing you know a few

milliamps and one nice thing is that we

can rescale this so this is currently

100 milliamps full scale but we can just

enter one here oops sorry

let's how about so now it's one amp full

scale but if we type 1m now it's one

milliamp full scale we can see at 0.6

volts it's getting close to one milliamp

however the resolution on this is quite

good so we can actually go down to a

hundred micro amp and we now we can

start to see the resolution of this

thing in fact on the 25 volt supplies it

has 35 or 30 micro amp resolution which

is quite good so if you're doing a

battery operated device you can monitor

the current consumption much more

accurately than you might have guessed

30 micrograms is quite good resolution

for that sort of thing another cool

feature is that you can still use the

dedicated National Instruments app to

use the oscilloscope on the device while

you're programmatically controlling

other parts of

a virtual bench as long as there's no

overlap so for example if your LabVIEW

program is only using the power supply

part of the device you can start the

virtual bench program and it will

disable the power supply since it's

being used by LabVIEW but you can still

have access to everything else so I've

set up the scope to single trigger at

244 millivolts and now we'll go back to

LabVIEW and run it as you can see it's

generated a new plot for us and then

here is the voltage that was recorded by

the scope so you can verify that the

thing is doing what you want and you

know make sure that the power supply you

know it's not doing something weird in

this case it actually does look like

something a little weird is going on you

would expect this to be zero and then

from zero monotonically increase it's

hitting the current limit here and it's

capping it and then when it shuts down

here's quite a bit of an undershoot so

the voltage is actually going negative

here according to the oscilloscope this

might just be because there's no actual

resistance across the power supply I've

just have a diode all by itself so I

don't know if I'd fault it quite to much

for this but this this does look a

little bit strange in this setup I have

the virtual bench connected to a

breakout board that I got from Adafruit

and on the breakout board there's a high

dynamic range light sensor that talks I

squared C and so the virtual bench is

powering the breakout board and we're

monitoring its current use and it's also

generating I squared C query commands

and then reading the data from the I

screwed C transaction here's the really

quick and dirty virtual instrument that

I whipped up just to get data out of the

sensor and so the section at the top of

the screen here runs the power supply

and then the section at the bottom runs

the I squared C stuff and so all it's

doing is initializing the sensor

enabling the sensor and then querying

data and so if I pass a flashlight beam

across the sensor board you can see the

bottom graph is showing the light

intensity values so once we've gone this

far it's easy to take the values that

LabVIEW is getting from the I squared C

bus from the sensor and then use those

values to do something else interesting

like either adjust one of the other

voltages you could have it output a

different voltage out of its supply

based on the light input from the sensor

or you have it adjust its function

generator or have it trigger the scope

or all kinds of things and so the real

power of this is just having all of it

kind of in one and I realize you can

connect separate pieces of equipment to

LabVIEW and accomplish almost the same

thing but this whole box cost two

thousand dollars and you don't have to

have separate drivers for each piece of

equipment I noticed that it would be

really helpful to have two monitors when

using the virtual bench one monitor for

the oscilloscope display and another

monitor for the LabVIEW programming I

ended up going back to using my

Tektronix oscilloscope to debug the I

squared C communications just because it

was too difficult to flip back and forth

and so it's much easier to have a

separate screen for this and so you can

see here these are the two bytes

together that are being read from the

light sensor and so when I pass the

flashlight over it you can see the

values changing there so my conclusion

is that if you just want to read and

write sensor values over I squared C or

spy you're probably better off using a

microcontroller development board or a

bus pirate or even an Arduino and in

this case Adafruit supplied Arduino code

with that breakout board so to get up

and running quickly it would have been

far easier just to connect it to an

Arduino if you want an oscilloscope

you're probably better off buying a

bench a full-on oscilloscope with knobs

in its own display however if you want

all of these things in one box with the

ability to pass data from instrument to

instrument easily I would say that the

virtual bench is actually really well

suited for that and like I say test

applications at the end of an assembly

line or test applications that have to

move around the lab frequently are

pretty well suited to it so I think it

has a pretty niche sort of area I know

National Instruments is probably

thinking that this would appeal more to

engineers just getting started needing

all this gear but I have a feeling it's

sort of better off for these interesting

sort of data logging and sensor

exercising sort of applications ok well

I hope you found that useful see you

next time bye----make money onlineTop Search Keyword : online earning, , make money online, earn money online, online earning, online earning sites, make money online free, online money income, earn money online free, money online, best way to earn money online, online income site, money earning websites, best online earning sites, easiest way to earn money online, earn money payment bkash, online money income site