Orientation and First Weeks
On my first day, I activated my National Research Council email and synchronized this email with Microsoft Outlook. Also, I activated my profile for a research computer and a personal computer. For the first few weeks, weekly instruction emails from NRC headquarters provided the information I should know as a new employee of NRC. These weekly emails were a detailed list of what I had to do each week from the beginning. Creating a signature in my email, recording my work time, and reviewing NRC policies were included in these emails.
There were also online workshops provided by NRC and the Canada School of Public Service (CSPS). Online workshops about security, work ethics, and safety issues were mandatory. For example, workshops about security let me know how NRC deals with the conflict with the interest of the government of Canada as a federal government organization, which was very interesting. The work ethics workshop let me know how to handle the problem caused by social interaction with co-workers. Also, I was impressed by Hazard Prevention Program (HPP) workshop. Since my research project made use of the equipment generating 600 volts of electric power, this workshop was very beneficial to me.
Day to Day
I worked remotely two days a week, but I dropped by the office if something urgent happened. I usually went to the office around 8:30 am. I started my day by checking email and Microsoft Teams. Then, I worked on programming Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system in LabVIEW. Sometimes, I needed to set up a meeting with NI, a producer of LabVIEW and Compact RIO controller(cRIO), to get their technical support. I had two biweekly meetings: one is for the team and the other is for the members of my research project. Before each meeting, I always prepared what to report during the meeting for at most half an hour. During this meeting, I reported what I did for two weeks and listened to what other co-workers did. This was a good chance to learn what NRC EME is currently interested in. Also, I went to the backyard of the office building where all the devices stay to check my program’s validity a couple of times per week.
Learning and Adaptation
As a mathematics student, it was not easy for me to get familiar with engineering experiments. Whenever I faced challenges, I looked for the instructions on the NI official website first. Also, there is a NI community which is an online community to network, ask questions and collaborate on code with other NI product users. In short, NI Community plays a role like Stack Overflow for LabVIEW users. I had a lot of help from this NI community to handle some of these challenges, too. Even though NI official website and NI community helped me out, some issues are too unique, so I was not able to find any information related to these issues on the Internet. In this case, I created a technical support request through the website. Then, I can get their technicians’ and engineers’ help directly via email or Microsoft Teams meetings. Thus, I learned LabVIEW as a programming language using this process.
Moreover, reporting my work to other co-workers during the biweekly meetings was not easy for me. This is because English is not my native language. In the first meeting, I made some mistakes like talking about something not related to the project since I was too nervous. Not to make mistakes during the meeting, I made a list of things I must speak of before these meetings and verbally read the list for practice. This really helped me to become less nervous and reduced unnecessary words.
Accomplishments and Challenges
During this Co-op term, I mainly spent my time building up a supervisory control and data acquisition system using LabVIEW. First, I created a network for all devices in the backyard to enable Modbus communication. Modbus is one of the communication protocols for multiple industrial devices through cables. In this project, Ethernet cables were used for Modbus TCP/IP. I set the IP addresses of the computer, our compact Rio Controller, an Ethernet switch and so on by having the same subnet mask and DNS server. Whenever I added a device to this network, I checked if this is correctly added to the network by using the ping command on the command window all the time.
Also, there were a couple of devices that used serial cables for Modbus communication. I needed to change the settings of these devices to read data via the Modbus protocol. These devices used RS-485 cables in order to enable Modbus communication. I had to change the baud rate, parity, data bits, and so on. It took more than a month to enable serial Modbus communication, but finally, I figured out how to make it work with a co-worker’s support. After setting up a network and Modbus communication, I was able to read the data from the devices in a real-time.
There was a huge challenge caused by an unexpected error message from LabVIEW. The computer did not have enough space in C drive to install LabVIEW software packages. Then, this resulted in an error message whenever I tried to run my program. To solve this issue, I tried to get help from NI Technical Support. NI Technical Support told me that I had to reinstall LabVIEW to solve this issue. It was frustrating but there were no other options. Before reinstalling LabVIEW, I asked for some advice from other NRC team members to install LabVIEW software packages efficiently space-wise. In the end, I was able to reinstall LabVIEW with more free spaces in C drive and no longer error messages came up from LabVIEW.