Bloomy made a substantial impact at this year’s NIWeek, held August 1st – 4th at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, TX. This year Bloomy was featured in a keynote presentation, four technical sessions, four exhibits and three awards. If you weren’t able to attend, you can view the presentations, blog articles, and video clips on our website, which are linked throughout this article.
Informative Presentations
Bloomy’s engineering team presented four technical sessions on the topics of ATE software architecture, battery testing, and effective LabVIEW development techniques.
Grant Gothing, Bloomy’s ATE R&D Manager, presented From the Experts: Improving ATE Test Sequence Adaptability Using HALs and MALs. His presentation explained how hardware and measurement abstraction layers (HALs & MALs) save development time, and minimize the impact of hardware changes as test system requirements evolve.
Bloomy’s Battery Test and Simulation Unit Manager, Steven Hoenig, presented Challenges and Solutions for Advanced Battery Management System Test. Steven showed how to develop solutions that effectively meet the needs of the full range of the BMS development lifecycle, including hardware-in-the-loop, validation, and manufacturing test. His presentation included an in-depth architectural review of a BMS test system built with Bloomy’s Battery Simulator 1200 and Battery Fault Insertion Unit (FIU), NI’s LabVIEW, TestStand, and VeriStand software, and the PXI and CompactRIO hardware platforms.
Peter Blume, President of Bloomy, presented Advanced Battery Testing Trends and Technologies. This presentation covered the latest trends in battery research and development, and corresponding test techniques, including cell characterization, safety and abuse testing, battery simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and end-of-line manufacturing test. Peter presented several application case studies including custom and commercial-off-the-shelf test solutions based on NI’s hardware and software platforms.
Senior Software Architect Ryan Vallieres presented Creating Effective User Experiences in LabVIEW™ Applications. Viewers learned from Ryan’s own personal trials and tribulations in creating great user experiences in LabVIEW. Ryan explored visual design concepts, usability, and valuable architectures and constructs for an effective LabVIEW user interface.
Exhibits
On the exhibition floor, Bloomy showcased products and platforms featuring applications in aerospace electronics real-time test, electronic assembly functional test, and battery test and simulation.
The NI Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) Simulator Concept System incorporates NI platforms and architectures to create flexible closed-loop simulations for real-time testing of a wide range of devices. Bloomy partnered with NI to contribute its vast aerospace test experience to the original specifications development, and is providing several of the SLSC modules, as well as integration of turnkey HIL systems. Bloomy provides the expertise to integrate these systems for aerospace and defense customers, providing more cost-effective systems for HIL testing with substantially faster lead times than traditional VME or other HIL systems. The system addresses testing a wide variety of aerospace electronics assemblies, such as electronic engine controls, flight control computers, and subsystem controllers. The system also scales up for use in system integration laboratories (SILs), and the platform's available switching modules provide the ability to switch between simulated components and real components, and to provide multiple methods of fault insertion.
The UTSTM Functional Test Exhibit demonstrates how the entry-level USB-based compactUTS and the modular PXI-based UTS are compatible through the UTSTM Software Suite. By utilizing the abstraction features of Bloomy’s UTS Software Suite, based on NI Test Stand, companies can improve the quality of their test development and deployment, while reducing time and effort.
The BMS HIL Demo is a small-scale demonstration of Bloomy’s BMS HIL Test System, an open system platform that hybrid and electric vehicle companies use for firmware development and regression testing of battery management systems. The demo shows how to safely and efficiently simulate the characteristics of advanced Li-Ion batteries and battery systems using NI PXI hardware running VeriStand real-time test software, in tandem with Bloomy’s Battery Simulator 1200 and Battery Fault Insertion Unit.
Awards
Bloomy was recognized for 25 years as an NI Alliance Partner! Bloomy became an NI Alliance Partner in 1992 and has consistently exceeded customer expectations building solutions on the NI platform. On Alliance Day the NI Alliance Partner Network team honored Bloomy and nine other partner companies for 25 years of dedication and commitment to the NI partnership.
Additionally, Peter Blume and Steven Hoenig were honored as finalists for the NI Engineering Impact Award. Their submission, coauthored with Miguel Gama-Valdez and Sue Slater of Jaguar Land Rover and Duncan Holden of Vayon Group, entitled “BMS HIL Test System Helps Jaguar Land Rover Accelerate Time to Market of Hybrid and Electric Vehicles”, was a finalist in the Transportation and Heavy Equipment category.
Congrats to Ryan Vallieres! Ryan was unbeatable in the SquareBattle, a LabVIEW coding challenge performed on the main stage of the NIWeek exhibition hall. Ryan designed a team of squares that exemplified early aggression and expansion. The eight other contestants were no match for Ryan's intensive LabVIEW skills.
See You Next May!
Bloomy is already preparing for NIWeek 2017, to be held in the spring for the very first time! We hope to see you there – May 22-25, at the Austin Convention Center!
About Bloomy
Bloomy Controls, Inc., (Bloomy) provides products and services for battery test and simulation, end-of-line manufacturing test, avionics real-time test, as well as world-class NI LabVIEW, TestStand, and VeriStand applications development. Typical applications include PCBA functional test, aerospace systems integration lab (SIL) data systems, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test, and rapid development of OEM software. These products and services exemplify the world’s best professional practices performed by a world-class team. A National Instruments (NI) Platinum Alliance Partner, Bloomy set the industry standard in LabVIEW development best practices by publishing its internal development standards in The LabVIEW Style Book (copyright © 2007, Prentice Hall). The Bloomy quality management system conforms to the ISO 9001:2008 standard. For more information, visit www.bloomy.com.
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