Software Development and System Integration at the White Field Research Facility

White Field is a 10,000-sq.-ft., $1.9 million research facility that currently houses a $3 million dollar wind tunnel, a $.5 million Transonic Axial Compressor and a $1.8 million Advanced High Performance Turbine. My duties at the facility have been multidisciplinary in nature, first as a technician installing electronic instrumentation, pressure transducers, thermocouples and associated electrical work, and also as the senior LabVIEW programmer developing software that initializes, configures, acquires and records various parameters from the experimental apparatus. The following article describes my work both as a technician and as a software developer and how it pertains to the instrumentation and software architecture.