Open Source Virtual Instrumentation—FPGA’s Leveraging the Design

In my last post on Open Source Virtual Instrumentation we looked at how open source conditions can be achieved by simply opening up the LabVIEW code for an application such as seen by the Virtual Microscope project in which all the LabVIEW code is available on Sourceforge.

There’s also OpenG who provides a source of information on open source LabVIEW. Jeffrey Travis runs a site with open source tools.

With the advent of the FPGA, virtual instrumentation finds a new phase of development. The FPGA brings software closer to the task at hand (data collection, control, synchronization, etc.). In this paper the authors propose a set of blocks mapping to an FPGA-based system to create a reconfigurable virtual instrumentation system.

Best regards,
Hall T.

Mirror Actuators in Telescope Applications

As discussed in previous posts, large telescopes today use a segmented mirror approach due to the deformation of mirrors larger than 5m. To this end, mirror actuators become a critical component of telescope design. A long-time National Instruments partner, Physik Instrumente uses nanopositioning techniques to provide 6 degrees of freedom control on the mirrors. Mirror actuators are critical as they represent a large portion of the failures in existing actuators.

The TMT telescope which stands for Thirty Meter Telescope solves the problem by shrinking the individual mirror size down to 1 foot and then applying many more actuators to the mirror to deform the shape to correct for atmospheric conditions.


Best regards,
Hall T.