2026 Workshop Information is here!

Written By GDevCon NA

Our amazing community has put together workshops that will bookend the conference. Both workshops are available as separate event tickets. If you need to purchase conference tickets and workshop tickets in a singular transaction, please use our contact form. We would be happy to facilitate that.

The space for our workshops has been graciously donated by Beckhoff USA. We are grateful for their generous support and help in facilitating these meaningful events.

Git Real: Practical Demonstrations on Recovering from Real-World Mistakes
Source Code Control/Version Control with Git is smooth sailing until it isn't. Ever commit code to a wrong branch by accident? Had a coworker accidentally step on your changes? Made a bad merge that you needed to undo? Did you discover your commit message needs to be modified immediately after pushing your branch? Or made any other mistake you need to recover from? 

This workshop contains practical exercises and lessons that help teach you to navigate these perilous waters with ease. Gain real-world experience in a sandboxed environment on what to do to find your way back to calmer seas.

Requirements: This workshop is targeted towards people who have used git before and are comfortable with basic operations with git. This course is not intended to be a first time introduction to git. All participants are expected to bring their own laptops. Participants are requested to update git to version 2.52.0 or above. The exercises will primarily feature CLI commands (as they are universally available), but if you are comfortable with any particular git GUI client, you are encouraged to use it during the workshop. Some of the exercises will delve into LabVIEW specific issues, and the demo code for that will be in LabVIEW 2017. Please install LabVIEW 2017 or above. Community edition works perfectly well (and is free!)

The Details

When: July 20, 2026 - the day before the Conference!

Time: 1:00pm-5:00pm

Where: Beckhoff Chicago - Training Facility (a few minutes walk away from the OLC)

Cost: $250. Purchase of this workshop includes a 50% discount on SAS Workshops online course, "Using Git Effectively".

About your Instructors:

About your Instructors:

Vijayanth "VJ" Reddy Kandukuri is a CLD. He was introduced to LabVIEW over a decade and a half ago. For someone who never spoke in graphic terms, he sure took to this "graphic language" in no time! By day, he works full-time at ARAV Systems with LabVIEW and TestStand. By night, he continues to tinker with LabVIEW and actively engage with the awesome community of fellow LabVIEW developers.

Sam Taggart is a CLA, CPI, and LabVIEW Champion with over a dozen years of LabVIEW experience. He cut his teeth running a lab in the Science and Technology Center at Westinghouse Electric Company,  leading a team that designed various testing and monitoring systems for nuclear power plants. Sam now owns SAS Workshops, a consulting company focused on teaching, mentoring, and project work. 

Actor Framework: A Hands-On Workshop
Are you curious about Actor Framework, and want to find out what it’s all about?  Or perhaps you’ve worked with it a bit, and need an opportunity to work with what you’ve learned?  Then this workshop is for you!

Here, you will design and build an Actor Framework system using the hardware selected for the Community Training Initiative.  The finished system will manage two Raspberry Pi Pico devices – a servo motor controller and a physical control panel.  You will design actors from a written specification, with the option to work from a script or solve the challenge on your own.  You will learn how to control hardware from an actor, how to write unit tests for your actors, and how to design systems to enable team development.

The Details

When: July 24, 2026 - the day after the Conference!

Time: 9:00am-1:00pm

Where: Beckhoff Chicago - Training Facility (a few minutes walk away from the OLC)

Cost: $380 if you need a hardware kit, $300 if you bring your own kit. *Please note - due to hardware shipping times, ticketing for this workshop will close on May 31st.

Requirements:

 You will need to provide your own laptop with:

  • LabVIEW 2020 or later

  • A USB-A port (can be a hub or adapter for your USB-C port)

  • Recommended:  your preferred unit testing add-on (Caraya, LUnit, or VI Tester)

  • Recommended:  Desktop Execution Trace Toolkit (if you already have a license)

You will need the CTI hardware kit; ; you can bring your own, or purchase the “kit included” ticket to have one waiting for you at the workshop.

(If you took Derrick Bommarito’s CTI workshop at last year’s GDevCon, bring it; you already have everything you need.)

Kit:

 

(Given the uncertainties of international shipping, we may need to substitute a different starter kit of comparable value for the “kit included” ticket.)

 

All students bringing their own kits are encouraged to get the latest CTI driver set, download the firmware version onto their Pi Picos, and do some simple experiments with the LabVIEW drivers to gain familiarity, and to make sure everything works as expected.

 

The instructor will e-mail the latest Pi Pico firmware to students prior to the course.  The LabVIEW drivers are here:  https://github.com/LabVIEWCommunityTraining/cti-drivers-lv-visa.git

About the Instructor:

Allen C. Smith, owner of Just ACS, is a consulting software architect and a globally recognized expert on Actor Framework.  He worked with Stephen Loftus-Mercer to develop the framework and wrote most of the support tools that ship with LabVIEW.  He developed, maintains, and frequently teaches NI’s official training course on the subject, Actor-Oriented Design in LabVIEW.  He uses Actor Framework extensively in his own project work, and currently heads its open source steering committee.

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