A Lifetime with LabVIEW

Tinkering with things has always been the name of my game. When I started high school, a few friends, a teacher and I started a robotics club. Our robotics club turned into a team competing in the national FIRST Robotics Competition. Click here to learn more about this awesome program.

We used LabVIEW to program our robots for the three years I was there building them. No one on the team, nor the mentors knew how to use LabVIEW, so we all started from scratch and everything we did was self taught. 

We not only used NI software, we also used National Instruments hardware to help build our robots (cRIO, routers, etc.). From the beginning of the most involved engineering projects I had worked on with mentors, National Instruments was there.

When I started university, I worked my first job as an assistant in a research institution. To my surprise, the institution used LabVIEW to control all of their large equipment in the laboratory, calibrate their lasers and had an entire cabinet of cRIOs. It was so cool to see software and hardware that I had learned to use in high school making research at a university institution possible.

Again, Digilent electronics and NI software was there.

Now – as a brand new college graduate – I work at Digilent, a National Instruments company, as a LabVIEW intern. I’m getting a chance to work behind the scenes on the software and hardware that I for so long have been surrounded by.

So whats the common thread in all of this?

It shows that growing up with electronics and finding a warm, software home to come back to could be your life’s common denominator.

So this holiday season: Start teaching! Keep learning! Digilent and NI will be right there with you every step of the way.

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