Aerospace and Defense Summit - Tuesday & Wednesday, August 7 & 8

For decades, COTS test platforms have evolved significantly to address complex system requirements while decreasing time to market and reducing total cost of ownership. Learn how to address the entire life cycle of aerospace and defense systems ranging from creating flexible, software-defined test systems to deploying real-time embedded systems for control, monitoring, and operation.

Who Should Attend

Physicists, Control Engineers, Instrumentation Engineers, Diagnostic Engineers, Researchers, Software Developers, Lab Managers

Keynote

Rapid Innovation on the Cheap: Lessons From DARPA and Commercial Space Flight
Author and journalist Michael Belfiore reports from the front lines of innovation to show how even the biggest organizations can stay nimble and leap ahead of the technology curve. Belfiore is the author of The Department of Mad Scientists, the first book to go behind the scenes at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and Rocketeers, the first book to chronicle the start of the commercial space age. He writes regularly for Air & Space, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Scientific American, and other leading publications. Michael Belfiore is the author of The Department of Mad Scientists, the first book to go behind the scenes at DARPA, and Rocketeers, the first book to chronicle the start of the commercial space age. He writes regularly for Popular Mechanics, Air & Space, Popular Science, Scientific American, and other leading publications.

Technical Sessions

CBATS: Improving Test Quality and Reducing Costs for the Air Force With a Common PXI-Based Tester
The US Department of Defense (DoD) has adopted the Common Bench-top Automatic Test System (CBATS), a PXI-based tester that CACI developed for the Air Force as a member of the DoD Family of ATS. CBATS is not only reducing the cost of testing but also improving mission readiness. It reduces the mean time to repair, so units are returned to the field quicker, and it increases the mean time between failure, keeping units in the field longer. Learn about CBATS and how test program sets developed with NI hardware, LabVIEW, and NI TestStand lead to higher productivity and faster offload from legacy testers facing obsolescence and support issues.

Using a Custom Acquisition System Based on NI Single-Board RIO for Real-Time Portable Measurements

See a demonstration of an NI Single-Board RIO device used to implement a lightweight power consumption data acquisition system. Also learn how you can adapt the techniques used in this system to create solutions for other custom data acquisition requirements. And examine the electromagnetic interference (EMI) testing process required to make this Wi-Fi-enabled system comply with FCC A and EN55022 A standards.

Nondestructive Structural Test for Aerospace

Examine a PXI-based industrial laser-ultrasonic system for the nondestructive inspection of aeronautic industry composites. It fires at 400 Hz, requiring synchronized analog and digital I/O, processing, and high-speed signal digitizing between each shot. Learn how using an embedded real-time controller to synchronize all these tasks from the control application reduced the hardware footprint required for implementation of the system. Also see how NI technology can help you easily integrate subsystems like handheld remotes, ranging systems, and an industrial robot using LabVIEW OPC, the LabVIEW Mobile Module, and an NI Embedded Vision System.

Developing and Testing Networked Avionics Systems and Devices

Today's commercial and military aircraft heavily leverage communications networks like those you might see in the latest server farms. From Fibre Channel to MIL-STD-1553 to ARINC 429, the functioning of the communications systems and each device in them is critical to the success and safety of these aircraft and their missions. Learn techniques and tips for testing the latest avionics devices and systems, including addressing stringent latency and redundancy requirements, from NI partner Avionics Interface Technologies, which has been at the heart of the avionics testing industry for over 12 years.

Testing Systems of Systems: Iron Bird Simulators and System Integration Labs

System integration labs, often referred to as iron birds, are large distributed real-time simulators used to test entire networks of embedded control modules (ECMs). NIhas had some key wins in these types of applications due to unique technologies featured in the NI hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) platform. At this session, learn the fundamental concepts associated with system integration labs and view demonstrations of the key technologies you need for these types of applications. Also explore a user solution based on the Embraer Legacy 500 Iron Bird.

Programming for Multi-Core: LabVIEW Gets it Right!

Learn about the options for developing software that leverages the promised advantages of multi-core processors, including the inherent advantages of a graphical dataflow oriented language. Developing software for multi-core processors has proven to be at least as difficult as one would imagine. Executing operations in parallel is the only option enables one to achieve the performance scaling that Moore's Law delivers with each new chip generation. Unfortunately, that is not the way we've been trained to think and solve problems. Worse, many software development API's and tools that focus on the problems associated with parallelism have been promised but have been slow to evolve. Hear tips on how to avoid the pit-falls in the development of a multi-core program and learn about mechanisms in LabVIEW that simplify the identification and implementation of parallelism within a program.

Quickly Translate Test Specifications Into Test Programs Through ATML

Explore a process that increases test program implementation productivity in NI TestStand using automated data conversion and code generation. Traditionally organizations maintain their product test data (test requirements, test specifications, test plans) as paper-like forms stored electronically and then manually reference these electronic forms when test programs are created. This automated data conversion and code generation process smoothly combines multiple software applications by interacting through a standard XML format conforming to the IEEE 1671.1 Automatic Test Markup Language (ATML) Test Description.

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