The 25th meeting of the Würzburg LabVIEW User Group (WUELUG) marked a small milestone for the community. This time, the group left its usual Würzburg surroundings and gathered at the Siemens Energy Systemprüfhaus in Nuremberg. The change of venue proved worthwhile: the event was fully booked, and tickets even had to be limited due to high demand.
A big thank-you goes to the hosts at Siemens Energy for providing the location and organizing the visit. Also, thank you to NI to sponsoring the catering! Familiar faces from the WUELUG community were joined by three(!) representatives from NI, making the evening a well-attended and lively exchange among LabVIEW professionals.
A Look Behind the Scenes at Siemens Energy
Since WUELUG was welcomed at the Siemens Energy testing facility, the evening began with a guided tour through the system testing laboratories. These facilities are used to validate and test large-scale energy transmission equipment, offering participants an interesting glimpse into the infrastructure behind modern power systems.
The tour set the stage for the technical program that followed.
Fieldbus Interfaces and the NI Toolchain
The first presentation of the evening was delivered by Holger Müller and Marco Krahmer from müller+krahmer. They introduced their work on integrating industrial fieldbus technologies with the NI toolchain.
The talk covered several real-time communication standards commonly used in industrial automation, including:
- Profinet
- EtherCAT
- SERCOS III
Central to the presentation was their LabVIEW driver built on top of the Hilscher cifX platform. The driver provides a convenient interface for integrating these fieldbus systems into LabVIEW-based applications, allowing engineers to interact with industrial communication buses directly from their measurement and control software.
The discussion highlighted the practical challenges of integrating industrial communication standards into test systems and demonstrated how custom drivers can simplify this process for LabVIEW developers.
Feldbus-Schnittstellen bei müller+krahmer
Perfect Timing: Pizza in Real Time
Following the first presentation, the evening moved into the traditional social break.
In keeping with the theme of real-time communication buses, the pizza delivery was timed almost perfectly with the end of the presentation. Within seconds, the tables were filled with fresh pizzas, providing the ideal opportunity to continue discussions and catch up with fellow developers.
gRPC in LabVIEW
After the break, the technical program continued with a presentation by Manu Sebald and Jan Göbel focusing on gRPC and its role in modern software communication architectures.
The session covered:
- the fundamentals of gRPC
- how gRPC can be used within LabVIEW applications
- integration patterns using the DQMH framework
- examples of gRPC usage inside NI products and platforms
For many attendees, this was a first deeper look at gRPC and its potential for building distributed systems and service-oriented architectures with LabVIEW. The presentation showed how modern communication frameworks are increasingly relevant even in traditional test and measurement environments.
Looking Ahead
As always, WUELUG thrives on community-driven topics. Several ideas for upcoming meetings were discussed, including:
- TLS-secured TCP communication in LabVIEW
- hobby projects built with LabVIEW and NI technologies
- generative AI and its applications for engineering workflows
- working with Packed Project Libraries (PPLs)
- lessons learned with NI Package Manager
- extending the LabVIEW IDE through VI scripting
Further suggestions are always welcome, and planning for upcoming meetings is already underway.
With strong attendance, engaging presentations, and a unique venue, WUELUG25 once again demonstrated the value of bringing the LabVIEW community together. The milestone meeting also reinforced a message that many attendees shared during the evening: there has rarely been a more interesting time to be a LabVIEW developer.