NATHAN LEFEUVRE
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Expertise

LabVIEW and National Instruments

10 years of LabVIEW applied to test and metrology benches, from the laboratory to industry.

As a Certified LabVIEW Developer with 10 years of LabVIEW experience, I design control and data acquisition applications on National Instruments hardware, from the operator interface to real-time control on NI CompactRIO.

Certified LabVIEW Developer (CLD)

The Certified LabVIEW Developer (CLD) certification, awarded by NI (National Instruments), attests to the ability to design and deliver structured, documented and maintainable LabVIEW applications. See the badge on Credly.

For a client, it is the assurance of an application that other developers can read: a clear architecture, documented code, and a bench that their team will be able to develop further.

What I develop with LabVIEW

  • Operator interfaces for test and metrology benches: bench status, current step and alarms, with advanced settings kept for the engineer.
  • LabVIEW Real-Time applications on NI CompactRIO (cRIO), with the NI Scan Engine.
  • Data acquisition chains with NI cDAQ and RIO: force, temperature, pressure, cameras, measurement reliability checks.
  • Fieldbuses: a cRIO acting as EtherCAT master for WAGO I/O, CANopen, Modbus, TCP/IP.
  • Interfacing with Python: Python Node, gRPC, ZeroMQ, calls from NI TestStand.

From the laboratory to industry

LabVIEW has been part of my career since my fluid mechanics research at the University of Newcastle (Australia): automating a 15 cm round jet with LabVIEW and Matlab, and running hot-wire measurements in a wind tunnel.

At Safran Reosc, from 2018 to 2024, I developed the control systems for the metrology benches of the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) mirrors, first as an engineer, then from 2022 as head of the software and instrumentation team, with a team of 5 engineers: zero-g support and positioning of 4.20 m, 3.5 t mirrors, and the M2/M3 interferometric bench.

For the active support of the M2 mirror, I designed the electronic and software control system, then led the validation of the system. Pneumatic cylinders, each connected to a support point by a high-precision force sensor, apply to the mirror exactly the force field of its cell in the telescope. The control system drives all the cylinders while also setting the height and tilt of the mirror.

On the interferometric bench for the M2 mirror, I designed the architecture of the control system and software, then supervised their development and the validation of the system. The bench drives a motorised multi-axis alignment, guided by a position sensor lit by a laser and by LVDT sensors. It is fully automated: a complete measurement of the mirror, including sub-aperture stitching, takes a few hours.

Since 2024, at STYREL, I have headed the test bench design office.

A maintainable architecture

  • Channels in a file, not in the code: on a cRIO, a channel manager reads a file at start-up and refuses to start the control loop if a channel is missing or a type does not match. The bench can be rewired without recompiling.
  • The right tool in the right place: LabVIEW for control, the user interface and real time, Python for data processing. The first question to settle is simple: which of the two is in charge?
  • Safety in the wiring: if communication is lost, the outputs fall back to their safe state, and this behaviour is tested at acceptance.
  • Frozen versions: the LabVIEW and driver versions are recorded for each project.

Lessons learned

See also: Custom test bench design · everything tagged #labview.