I had the pleasure of talking with Brian Spears and Jassem Shahrani of Sixclear on today's podcast. I had a great time talking about how they got started running their successful business which has LabVIEW as its core. Powered by LabVIEW, if you will.

In addition to getting some insights into how they work and collaborate, they also made a huge announcement on the show of a new product they are really excited about unleashing onto the LabVIEW community. Take a listen to find out what it is.

*Keep listening after the closing title of the podcast and listen to some bonus content*

Here are links to items mentioned in this podcast episode:

A quick podcast interview with Hassan Atassi, who is managing the latest LabVIEW Coding Challenge for the Winter of 2011. Listen to the podcast and find out what the two different challenges are and how you can get involved. The winner gets a sweet Sony Cyber-shot HX9V Digital Camera ($300).

Some Deadlines to be aware of:

Here are links to items mentioned in this podcast episode:

I'm back from a very long absence. I've been very busy on various projects so I apologize for leaving you with such a huge gap. However, now I'm back and starting the flow of new audio podcast episodes and soon, new videos.

In this episode of the VI Shots podcast, I interview the three members of the recently formed Field Architects group at NI. Nancy Hollenback, Brian Powell and Charlie Knapp.

 From their blog:

We are a small, elite group of LabVIEW experts working in large accounts and helping engineers become more proficient in LabVIEW. We guide software architectures, develop technical leaders, and teach and encourage good software engineering.

Take a listen to this episode to gain some insight as to how this group of experts is expanding LabVIEW proficiency among large development teams by promoting good software engineering tools and practices.

Here are links to items mentioned in this podcast episode:

I've reached the 10th podcast episode! That's a big milestone for VI Shots.

Another big milestone is the 25th anniversary of LabVIEW and the release of LabVIEW 2011. To get the rundown of all the new features, I asked Jeffrey Philipps from National Instruments to join me in this podcast episode. Do you know why the new controls palette was named Silver? Listen to find out.

In addition to the new version of LabVIEW, we discuss the NIWeek 2011 keynotes and the “what's new in LabVIEW” session.

Here's a hit list of some of the cool new stuff:

In this episode of the VI Shots podcast, I invited three members of the LabVIEW community to talk about how to get the most out of NIWeek 2011. I have Darren Natinger from National Instruments, Christopher Relf from VI Engineering and Justin Goeres from JKI.

There are a lot of things to see at NIWeek and we cover some of the technical sessions you can attend and how to get the most out of this year's technology conference if this is your first time or even if you've been there before.

I will be at NIWeek this year, so feel free to come up to me and say hello. Most of the time I will be hanging out at the JKI booth on the expo floor. I will also be attending the LAVA OpenG BBQ and will be on a discussion panel called We are the Champions (Tues. Aug 2, 2:15–3:15 p.m. – room 10C).

Here are more links to items mentioned in this podcast episode:

In this episode of the VI Shots podcast I sit down with Terry Stratoudakis who is the CEO of Wall Street FPGA. A company that specializes in the acceleration of trading and financial analytics software using LabVIEW FPGA.

This is a new industry in general for LabVIEW and specifically LabVIEW FPGA. I was skeptical at first and a little confused. Where exactly are FPGAs used here? No worries, Terry explains it all to us. By the end of the interview, I was all fired up to find other untapped industries where I could use LabVIEW FPGA.

There is a lot of information packed in this podcast episode so you might want to listen to it more than once.

PS: Terry will be at NIWeek this year giving an unrelated presentation (TS3261-The Missing Link – 8/3/11 1:00 PM – Rm: 10C). So track him down if you're there.

Here are more links to items mentioned in this podcast episode:

In this episode of the VI Shots LabVIEW podcast I chat with Sam Kristoff and Ben James from National Instruments. Sam was responsible for most of the development in the LabVIEW interface for Arduino toolkit that was released a few weeks ago.

I mention in the interview that I was having problems getting LabVIEW to communicate with the arduino under Mac OS. Since then I have resolved my issue. It turns out I was using the wrong port. The VISA serial port listings under Mac are not very descriptive and what I thought was the USB port was actually the Bluetooth.

I've recorded a detailed video tutorial on how to get started with the toolkit which you can find here.

Here are links to items mentioned in this podcast episode:

In this episode of the VI Shots LabVIEW podcast I chat with Crystal Drumheller from W.L.Gore and Associates in Flagstaff Arizona and Justin Goeres from JKI. Before Crystal worked for her current employer, she worked for National Instruments. That's where she got the LabVIEW bug and hasn't looked back.

Both Crystal and Justin mentor FIRST Robotics teams and they both participated with their teams in the FIRST championship in St. Louis, Missouri this past April. Have you ever wondered about being a mentor for a local FIRST robotics team? Listen to this podcast to find out first hand from these mentors.

Also, listen to find out how Justin ended up with a bloody head wound during the championship.

Here are links to items mentioned in this podcast episode:

Several weeks ago, National Instruments hosted an online coding challenge called: Code Madness 2011. In this episode of the VI Shots LabVIEW Podcast, my guests are Grant Heimbach who organized the challenge and Peter Kovacs who was the winner.

Peter wrote some awesome code that scans through the NI Community site and returns all the documents available from various categories and groups. Take a listen to see how the code he wrote led to an opportunity for a spin-off product which Peter is working on releasing to the LabVIEW Tools Network.

Here are links to items mentioned in this podcast episode:

In this episode of the VI Shots LabVIEW podcast, I have Darren Nattinger of National Instruments back to chat about his favorite feature of LabVIEW – Quickdrop. Darren is not new to this podcast. I had him on the show back in episode 002 where he gave us some interesting insight to his background and his unique role at NI.

Did you know that Quickdrop was written using LabVIEW? It's true, which would makes sense since Darren programs exclusively in G. There are also several other interesting and useful tips Darren lays down in this episode, including ways on how to make using quickdrop even faster with Quickdrop shortcuts.

Something that was discussed in the show are Quickdrop plugins. Since 2009, there are a few plugins that ship with LabVIEW. My favorite is the one that moves control labels on the diagram from above to the sides using .

Here are the links to items mentioned in this episode: