DigiKey and NI: Two Rights Make for Better Engineering

Most electrical and electronic engineers know that DigiKey is one of the first companies to go to when it comes to purchasing parts for their latest and greatest project, be it for a single prototype, or later for a full-on production run. Regardless of what stage you’re at, there’s always the sense that DigiKey’s “got your back.”

Similarly, engineers and enterprises know that National Instruments, now NI, is always there to support their state-of-the-art designs, because—since its inception—NI has been at the cutting edge of data acquisition and test and measurement technology. So much so, that it quickly became a world leader in the production of automated test equipment (ATE) and virtual instrumentation software. Common applications include data acquisition, instrument control, and machine vision. Industries as diverse as automotive, aerospace and defense, industrial machinery, semiconductor manufacturing, and medical devices rely on the NI software-connected approach for their success.

Today, NI is foundational in areas like software defined radio (SDR), 5G, and “Big Analog Data.” In fact, NI can make the case for having coined the term Big Analog Data due to its history of managing enormous amounts of acquired data to help engineers find faults and improve designs.

All this is prelude to the exciting news that NI has joined the DigiKey family of manufacturers. DigiKey is now a source for NI’s Test and Measurement solutions, as well as its Cable Assemblies and Connectors and Interconnects.

Great companies, both Engineering Hope

The reason this is exciting is because both companies focus on engineering and engineers, never taking either for granted or forgetting that what they do changes peoples’ lives. DigiKey, for example, did its part early on in the COVID-19 pandemic when it collaborated with the University of Minnesota to rapidly design and make available a simple, basic ventilator that could be manufactured quickly and inexpensively to help patients breathe.

Emphasizing both the power and the personal reality of engineering, NI has been working with the Washington Post Brand Studio (WP BrandStudio) to tell a series of stories under the name of “Engineering Hope.” One particularly poignant tale focuses on an engineer at NI, David Yi, and one of NI’s customer companies, Berlin Heart. The story also involves two engineers at Berlin Heart — Oliver Peters in research and development, and Matti Elsner in the test department.

When David first joined NI, one of the first customers he supported was Berlin Heart. At that time, David, Oliver, and Matti had no idea how their lives would become intertwined by the work they were doing.

In 2014, David and his wife welcomed a baby girl, Elena, into the world (Figure 1). Everything seemed normal until at the age of only five months Elena suddenly collapsed, and her parents had to perform CPR until paramedics arrived to rush her to the local hospital, from where she was air-lifted to the cardiac center in Berlin.

Figure 1: Elena was welcomed into the world in 2014 but after only five months was diagnosed with a serious heart condition with little chance of her recovering on her own. (Image source: NI)

It turned out that Elena had a serious heart condition and there was little chance she would recover on her own. To keep Elena alive long enough for her heart to develop, it was necessary to use an external device connected directly to her heart. The system in question was called EXCOR Pediatric from—you guessed it—Berlin Heart. It was designed by Oliver Peters and tested by Matti Elsner.

As David says in the video Hope for the Next Generation, if the only thing keeping your loved one alive is a machine, you want to be sure that it's as fail-proof as possible. Discovering from personal experience, the importance of quality and reliability in a device as critical as the EXCOR has given him a different perspective on his day-to-day work.

First offerings from NI

David’s story is remarkable, yet is no doubt repeated often. How many engineers have sat next to a hospital bed or in an aircraft and noticed something they had a hand in designing? Many, I’m sure, especially when that company is as well known for its quality and reliability as NI.

The first NI offerings from DigiKey testify to that reliability and quality. For example, the 779640-01 USB-6525 data acquisition card module is a small, portable digital I/O device (Figure 2). It features eight channel-to-channel optically isolated inputs (±60 volts DC), eight channel-to-channel optically isolated solid-state relay outputs (60 volts DC/30 Vrms_max), a 32-bit event counter, a full-speed USB 12 megabit per second (Mbit/s) bus interface, and built-in, removable connectors for easy connectivity.

Figure 2: The NI 779640-01 USB-6525 data acquisition module has eight channel-to-channel optically isolated inputs and eight channel-to-channel optically isolated solid-state relay outputs. (Image source: NI)

Similarly, NI’s General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB) and communications offerings include modules like the 780936-01 PCIe-GPIB+ instrument control device that offers a unique combination of an analyzer and an IEEE-488 controller in a PCle card (Figure 3).

Figure 3: The NI 780936-01 PCIe-GPIB+ instrument control device offers a unique combination of an analyzer and an IEEE-488 controller in a PCle card. (Image source: NI)

Plugging into a computer’s PCIe slot, this device allows instruments to be easily integrated into the system via GPIB, while also allowing users to troubleshoot GPIB related software and hardware issues.

Conclusion

DigiKey and NI share common values with regard to quality and reliability, as well as how they view their role with regard to helping engineers succeed in their endeavors. As David Yi, Oliver Peters, and Matti Elsner can attest, these attributes are key for mission-critical and safety-critical systems upon which human lives rely. For the engineers designing these systems, NI is renowned for providing high-quality and high-reliability connectivity test products and systems. DigiKey is no doubt as proud to support them as a distributor, as I am excited to see them come together.