Internet of Testing

Internet of Testing is all about productivity improvement. Market leading test and measurement technology from NI integrated with leading Cloud technology from IBM makes at all possible.

"LabVIEW - Improving the Productivity of Engineers and Scientists". is the main value proposition of National Instruments, as stated on their web site. LabVIEW is great tool for test and measurement of all kinds of physical phenomena. Robustness of the technology makes it good for most demanding live monitoring and automation control applications.

The real value comes from the high productivity of software development with graphical LabVIEW programming language. Graphical presentation makes LabVIEW program easy and intuitive to understand, but the value lies in the great amount of readily available mathematical algorithms, instrument drivers, communication interfaces, and user interface elements.

LabVIEW program can run in a PC (Win, Mac, Linux) or in a measurement instrument (RT-Target) like myRIO, CompactRIO,SingleBoard RIO, System-on-Module RIO, etc.  However, so far LabVIEW has provided limited support for remote operations and distributed architecture. But now the situation has changed.

Internet of Things Foundation is a IBM cloud-hosted service for collecting, storing, and integrating data of Things. IoT Foundation provides ready and direct integration to Bluemix, it's like one of the Bluemix APIs. When talking of Bluemix, we're yet again talking about productivity improvement, which is the main value proposition of PaaS (Platform as a Service).

When combining these two technologies, we get productivity square two. And that's the big thing!

LabVIEW recipe for IOT Foundation

Espotel has contributed my work to the open source community. It's a recipe how to connect any LabVIEW program, running either in a PC or in a measurement instrument, to IOT Foundation cloud fast and easily. It's a simple LabVIEW library which can be included in any LabVIEW project.

Example usage of the LabVIEW library for IOT Foundation

IOT Foundation uses MQTT for data transfer. It's fast, reliable, lightweight and secure messaging protocol intended for M2M and IoT applications. The LabVIEW library consists of three main elements:

• Open MQTT connection to IOT Foundation
• Publish (transfer) data over MQTT to IOT Foundation
• Close MQTT connection to IOT Foundation

The library contains one more element for reading device credentials from a file. IOT Foundation provides secure device registration, authentication and data transfer mechanism, based on credentials. Storing credentials is a file makes it possible to use the library in any stand-alone instruments without local user interface.


Applications:

• Remote real-time LabVIEW or HTML user interfaces
• Remote measurement and distributed testing
• Condition monitoring