From Russia With Love: Control Professors Impressed with LabVIEW-based Experiments

As part of our ongoing process of integrating Quanser products and curriculum with National Instruments (NI) products and software, I travelled to Russia in December to attend the Engineering, Scientific and Educational Applications Based on National Instruments Technologies Conference, where I was to meet the young and energetic NI Russia sales team.

It was the perfect opportunity to introduce them to our capabilities and show them how the Quanser/NI integration plans could help them better serve the Russian academic market. It was also an occasion for me to meet many Russian controls professors and introduce them to Quanser products and capabilities.

Delegates at the recent conference "Engineering, Scientific and Educational Applications Based on National Instruments Technologies" in Moscow, Russia had an opportunity to see live demos of integrated Quanser/NI systems.

As the title of this blog suggests, our visit was a huge success. The Quanser booth turned out to be one of the busiest, best attended ones at the conference, and our product demos and solutions created quite a bit of excitement.

QNETs are already available in Russia from NI. At the conference, we demonstrated the Quanser Driving Simulator and the Active Suspension workstation. These demos work seamlessly with NI's Compact Rio and LabVIEW, and come with LabVIEW-based course materials. These workstations are gaining a lot of interest at engineering labs around the world because they save educators precious time while enriching their students’ educational experience.

Quanser and NI product marketing material proves to be extremely popular
with the conference delegates.

When professors learned that Quanser had over 80 experiments for control labs, many of which easily integrate with NI products, they were very excited. When they found out that our future products would be built with NI integration in mind, they were even happier. Ultimately our integrated focus will enable NI to offer more choice and flexibility to the Russian academic market.

That’s of utmost importance. With more choice come more ways for universities to integrate their existing LabVIEW software and NI hardware with Quanser control experiments to offer students the most exciting and practical engineering education experience. This flexibility is particularly valuable where university budgets are constrained. Recruitment and retention of students is also a key focus.

Delegates took a hands-on approach to getting familiar with Quanser/NI systems.

The depth of Quanser experiments and course materials is an added benefit to the teaching community. Quanser experiments are designed to reflect real-world industrial applications and help graduate young engineers ready to be of value to their employers right away.

The NI Russia team is fully onboard with the exciting possibilities offered by the Quanser/NI partnership. Our NI colleagues are now in a better position to suggest how to best pair Quanser experiments with NI products to provide cost-effective solutions that meet Russian university teaching needs.

- Amirpasha Javid
Amirpasha Javid is an Applications Engineer at Quanser. He brings his past experience in developing Quanser controls systems and course materials to his current role of sharing his technical expertise with existing and new business relationships.