My NI Week Creation: The π Factory
by Darin at N30 24.652, W097 43.644
Today I spent my day designing this contraption. It looks cool I think. However, it is strikingly unimpressive in function -- all it does is calculate digits of π and flash the latest calculated digit out to the 7-segment numeric display (The digital display used in alarm clocks and microwaves). The cool part: Thanks to using NI hardware and software this took me 2 days to make. And most of that was trying to relearn what a resistor was and surveying the bunches of different ways to calculate digits of π.
Hardware: cRIO-9002 Real-Time Controller. This is the processor tirelessly crunching away on π. It can crank the whole first 1000 digits or so out really quickly, so I make it go sloooower. Then there's the cRIO-9102 FPGA backplane, which is doing the calculations of turning a '5' into digital outputs that are displayed on the 7-segment display. And then the user interface, which runs on any ordinary windows box capable of running LabVIEW.
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