Important course booking guidelines

Researcher Academy courses are very popular and the majority are run in both semesters to give you the opportunity to attend at a time of the year that suits you. Semester 1 courses will be available for booking from the second week of October and Semester 2 courses from the second week of February.

Target audience

The course is open to all Engineering & Technology related postgraduate research students and research staff.

Process

Two Practical workshops running from 10 am - 16:00 pm with a one hour lunch break.

Course Description
This course teaches you the basics of control and instrumentation with the graphical programming environment LabVIEW. It builds on the content of the courses ‘Introduction to LabVIEW for Engineers’ and ‘Data acquisition with LabVIEW for Engineers’ and introduces the core concepts of how to communicate with, and connect to, external hardware such as sensors and actuators. The course will cover solutions that are fully implemented in software on the desktop PC, as might be used in a lab, but also considers embedded software programming and FPGA programming for hardware based controls. The course will cover specifics of the LabVIEW environment but also more general control theory and it’s the application as well as introducing National Instruments advanced toolkits ‘Control Design and Simulation’, for prototyping controllers, and the ‘NiVision’, for machine vision applications. By the end of the course you will have a thorough understanding of the application of LabVIEW for many control and instrumentation challenges common to engineers.
The course includes the following topics:
• Communicating with hardware (cRIO devices, Ni-DAQ devices, GPIO, and embedded systems).
• General control theory, managing stability, understanding the effect of sample rate and jitter.
• Simple controller examples such as PID control.
• Programming structures for control in LabVIEW.
• LabVIEW toolkits for rapid process development
        o ‘Control Design and Simulation’
        o ‘NiVision machine vision systems’

Booking Guidelines

Latecomer policy

Researchers should plan to arrive prior to the advertised course start time. Except for exceptional reasons, there will be no admittance to a Researcher Academy or Faculty Training Programme (FTP) course 15 minutes after the advertised course start time.

Importance of booking commitment
When booking on to a Researcher Academy short course you are entering into a commitment to attend. If you find that you are no longer available to attend you MUST cancel your place (on the system if more than three days before the course or if at short notice by emailing pg-training@nottingham.ac.uk). This will ensure that your place can be offered to another researcher on the waiting list. Failure to cancel a place results in other researchers missing out on places through the waiting list process.

It is unacceptable for researchers to just not attend when booked onto a course. Researcher Academy maintains records of those who repeatedly do not attend courses they have booked. This may affect future eligibility to book onto further Researcher Academy courses and will affect considerations for Researcher Academy funded opportunities.

Pre-Requisites Pre-requisites

This course assumes that you are familiar with the basics of LabVIEW programming. A good primer would have been to attend the ‘Introduction to LabVIEW for Engineers’ and ‘Data acquisition with LabVIEW for Engineers’ courses.