Can you believe it has already been 2 full years since the first WUELUG? Visiting other companies is starting to become WUELUG’s trademark. This time at WUELUG08, the first meeting of 2020, we visited the premises of iNDTact, right here in Würzburg!
iNDTact
iNDTact specialise in building vibration sensors. But on top of that, they lay a huge emphasis on keeping things modern and integrating Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things. Besides manufacturing hardware, they also handle the softer side of things. LabVIEW is used to gather and analyse sensor data.
WUELUG08 Presentations
We kicked off the meeting with presentations from iNDTact employees. We received a detailed insight into the company history, culture and development work-flow.
Thomas Henkel, who works with LabVIEW at EP Ehrler Prüftechnik, gave a presentation about utilising G# and OOP in LabVIEW. Many programmers who are experienced in other languages, have difficulties adjusting to LabVIEW. But thanks to G#, which is based on the principles of Java and C#, they can use all the techniques they are used to. G# handles everything from garbage collection, through classes to inheritance.
Unfortunately, one of our presenters couldn’t attend, but Benjamin Hinrichs, from Siemens, jumped in at the last moment to tell us all about his experiences obtaining the CLD certification. We were immensely proud that he mentioned Manu’s own article regarding his journey. We’re delighted that our website serves as an important learning tool for many people!
He emphasised the importance of paying attention to style and documentation. More than half of the total score stems from these points. And of course, these skills are also vital in actual work, not just exams.
If enough people band together, they can get NI to organise a local certification event. Perhaps we should create a WUELUG certification event? We could motivate each other to achieve our very best. And then celebrate together too. 🙂
Last, but not least, Joerg continued to explain our style guidelines. To see our principles, you can take a look at our Dokuwiki page. The discussion led to a healthy, and sometimes quite passionate debate. Everyone has their own best practices, and it’s always nice to form an optimal synthesis.
Lessons learned at WUELUG08
As always, we had tremendous fun! it’s exciting getting to know new companies, people, and work-flows. The presentations were interesting and about things that concern many of us. The pizza (thank for the sponsoring NI!) we ordered was punctual and delicious, and we had ample time to network and chat during the break. However, we still need to work on technical things, setting up a projector is always tedious and fiddly. Also, the agenda should be clearer and visible the entire time, possibly on a whiteboard.
Acknowledgments
As always, huge thank you goes to NI, not just for the pizza, but for making WUELUG possible! In particular, thank you Peter Nicolaus for attending too!
Up Next
In April we yet again will visit a company. EP Ehrler Prüftechnik this time, in Niederstetten, which is just a short drive away. We will discuss error-handling and discover a fun little experiment von Pascal Heinen, the well-know Snake game, running on an FPGA. There will also be a surprise presenter from NI who will give us an introduction to working with Diadem. We hope to see you soon!
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