Eight Engineers Walk into a Penny Arcade…
At Solubit, we’ve had a hybrid work model for years. We work together to support our customers every day while being spread between our Texas and Colorado locations. Some of our team members prefer to work from home 100% of the time, and others come into the office regularly. We’re fans of flexibility.
Each year we gather for a company meeting to align on process, trajectory, and goals. This year we had the pleasure of meeting at our Manitou Springs, CO location. Manitou Springs is a quirky, little mountain town full of hidden treasures. The Penny Arcade was a favorite of all Nerds in attendance! We had a lot of winners at the Horse Races and Skee Ball games.
Let’s Talk NI Connect and LabVIEW Updates
We opened our meeting with a conversation reviewing major takeaways from NI’s first annual NI Connect event. As an NI Integration Partner, we take great interest in new product announcements and product upgrades. Reports on LabVIEW updates show this software getting stronger and more competitive with Python and other open platforms. It is now compatible with Apple and Linux products. LabVIEW is a powerful tool that our customers rely on, so watching it move into a more globally accepted programming language is exciting.
System Link is another impressive tool discussed at NI Connect. This web UI builder can connect to all testers to perform upgrades and deploy tests from a single platform. We are looking for opportunities to integrate this software for our customers to reduce complexity and increase efficiency in their testing processes and analytics.
Solubit Giving Back
One of our company goals is to find ways to increase accessibility into the Test and Measurement industry. We don’t want to sit back and hope this technical industry becomes more inclusive in the future. It’s important that we contribute to forward motion and tangible progress. Stay tuned for exciting, new initiatives and partnerships in the next year, geared to open wide industry entry gates for the next generation of innovators.
Production Test and TestStand
Sarah Morales is our resident TestStand expert. She offered an excellent introductory training for our team, highlighting the major benefits of this software for our customers in production test.
TestStand is designed for production test, specifically for repetitive, complex sequences. Though this product is marked as an out-of-the-box solution, it is highly flexible and customizable. TestStand is stocked with tools that save development time for our customers. One example of this is the built-in capability of reusing codebase.
GMOD is a set of development libraries built in-house by Solubit developers. It is an ideal framework to pair with TestStand integration. This is because to integrate with the dynamic toolset in TestStand, you’ll want heavy modularity at the front end of development. The GMOD is at its core a set of development templates that enables a quick start to your project that is inherently modular.
Controllino MEGA 100-200-00 PLC Demonstration
Goal #1 for us is customer success. A common barrier to success for our customers is budget. We are always looking for ways to reduce the cost of test and automation so that even the lightest budgets can enjoy increased efficiency with a Solubit solution.
Controllino has developed notable products to address the budget problem when it comes to automation hardware. Controllino MAXI, MEGA, and MINI are all industry-grade PLCs with open-source software, fully compatible with Arduino. We are eager to offer our customers this lower-cost option that will drastically improve their project time-to-market.
Steven Howell, a developer on our team, took on the task of building a getting-started LabVIEW codebase that we can offer our customers. Stay-tunes for more on this.
Key Takeaways
Looking back at 2020, we are proud to have supported many customers through an exceptionally challenging year. We’re grateful we were able to solve big problems, begin new partnerships, and add remarkably smart Nerds to the Herd. We hope to support your success and growth in the years to come.
