11/10/2011: Sterling Allan reports that Rossi and National Instruments have signed a contract for NI to provide all instrumentation for the E-Cat. (LINK)
11/11/2011: Rossi posts reader's comments on his blog referring to Allan's report. He doesn't specifically confirm the report, but the fact that he posted at least 2 comments with the "news" suggests that he wanted to spread the "news". (LINK, LINK)
11/14/2011: National Instruments releases a statement stating that their equipment is used in a variety of physics research, including both "hot" and "cold" fusion. The mention in passing, "Additionally, the Leonardo Corporation has intentions to incorporate NI tools in its control system." (LINK)
11/10/2011 - 1/18/2012: Rossi and his associates make several statements about how NI is working closely with NI and Rossi's "secret customer" as recently as 1/18/2012. (LINK, LINK, LINK, LINK)
Note that the most recent of these messages was damage control from the discovery that Rossi never shipped the original 1MW E-Cat, even though he had claimed earlier that he had done so.
2/19/2012: Steven Krivit posts an email from Julia Betts, Corporate Communications and Investor Relations Manager for National Instruments. (LINK)
Here only factual comment related to Rossi, Leonardo Corporation or the E-Cat is:
"we were only in discussions with the Leonardo Corporation regarding the use of National Instruments engineering tools. Currently Leonardo Corporation/Andrea Rossi is not a customer of National Instruments."Nothing about a contract being signed and nothing about NI ever doing any work on or for the E-Cat. Just some pre-sales talks that apparently fell through, just like Rossi's never-activated contract with the University of Bologna.
2/19/2012: Rossi responds to the email denying a relationship with NI. His tone has drastically changed. In this post, he says nothing about actually having a contract. He says nothing about his earlier claims that NI and his "secret customer" were working closely together. He says nothing about his earlier claims that NI was helping solve technical problems with the E-Cat. Now, he only claims that they "taught" him and "his people" over the course of "weeks". (LINK).
He also, belatedly, mentions that his "secret customer" has decided not to use NI equipment. This would have been more meaningful if he had mentioned it before he was caught in this contradiction.
Interesting, Julia Betts confirms only Rossi's latest comment, which ignores all of the claims he has been making over the last three months, and only speak to National Instruments "teaching" him useful information.
In spite of the spin this will no doubt get, all it proves is that Rossi received some information from NI. It does not prove that NI ever saw an E-Cat, let alone worked on one.
It seems that this is just another example of Rossi claiming that he was going to work with a credible organization (NI, UniBo) just for the purpose of getting some good publicity and borrowing credibility from those organizations.
Update: Julia Betts of National Instruments contacted me this morning and asked that I make two clarifications to this article. While Ms. Betts and National Instruments are overall satisfied with the tone and accuracy of this piece, there are some things they would like clarified to avoid any misunderstanding. NI generally concurs with the characterization of their relationship with Leonardo Corp as portrayed by Andrea Rossi, and as outlined by his statements made recently and linked to above. However, they cannot vouch for EVERY statement he has made regarding their relationship in the last couple of months as it is difficult to be aware of everything he has said. The discussions and technical collaboration that NI engaged in with Leonardo Corp included NI making preliminary suggestions on platforms that could be used for the control system. These types of discussions are part of standard practice in order to assess and accurately meet a customers needs.
So, Julia Betts is only confirming Rossi's latest statement. That's the one where he drops any claims of NI doing any actual work on the E-Cat, and only talks about how they were useful in "teaching" him.
She also states that they only had the types of discussions about how NI instrumentation can be used for control applications.
So, once again, a clear case where Rossi has lied about his relationship with a legitimate organization in order to "borrow" some credibility.