Hottinger Brüel & Kjær (HBK), a specialist in sound, vibration, mechanical and electrical testing solutions, has released the latest version of Aqira, a web-based data analytics and process management platform that leverages nCode software technology. 
 

Designed for scalable deployment within Aqira, nCodeDS (nCode Digital Streams) now provides  a brand new graphical interface for defining data processing networks required to analyze high volumes of sensor data coming from a wide range of sources. With the new graphical interface, analyses can be defined by simply dragging and connecting processing nodes on a canvas. The power of nCodeDS can also be used with Python scripting within Aqira enabling a high degree of flexibility. 
 
nCodeDS product manager, Dr. Fred Kihm, said: “Applications involving the tracking of real-world product usage continuously generate large quantities of data. The challenge is to extract value from such big data. Engineers need to gain meaningful insights in order to reduce development, operational and warranty costs.” 
 
The processing speed of nCodeDS is also applicable to processing many terabytes of more traditional test and measurement data. The new interface of nCodeDS makes tasks, such as running high performance data fusion, transformation and engineering analytics, accessible to engineers as well as data scientists. 
 
Dr. Kihm added: “Engineers need an easy way to clean sensor data, reduce it, extract information, produce trends and possibly even integrate some machine learning algorithms. We believe the new graphical interface will enable engineers to build the required analysis processes with ease.” 
 
Another significant aspect of Aqira 2021 is the ability to create “no code” engineering apps that are also graphically created by users. These applications are defined by experts but can be executed by anyone with appropriate access and a web-browser. This enables the democratisation of many time-consuming engineering tasks, hiding the complexity but sharing the standardised process. Aqira 2021 includes a new capability to import and export apps, making it easier to transfer apps between systems. Visualisation enhancements include a new surface plot capability, which could be used (for example) in motor efficiency maps from testing of electric vehicles.