Customer Solutions

Drexel Enhances its Engineering Curriculum with LabVIEW

Author(s):

Murat Tanyel, Drexel University

Industry:

University/Education

Product:

GPIB & Instrument Control, LabVIEW

The Challenge:

Providing modern tools to engineering students for learning the fundamentals of instrumentation.

The Solution:

Developing virtual instrumentation tools consisting of Macintosh-based workstations using GPIB and LabVIEW.

Engineering of the near future will require using more sophisticated technology tools. To meet this challenge, the College of Engineering at Drexel University has revised its engineering curriculum to enhance the educational experience for engineering students, making it more hands on. This revision, a program called the Enhanced Educational Experience for Engineering Students (E4), sought to develop intellectual curiosity, creativity, and a cohesive understanding of engineering fundamentals. The E4 Program is the basis for the current engineering core curriculum at Drexel.

Major program components of the new Drexel engineering curriculum include: Mathematical Foundations of Engineering (MFE); Physical Fundamentals of Engineering (PFE); and Engineering Design and Laboratory (ED&L). LabVIEW application software, which plays a role in these program components, is particularly attractive to engineers because its graphical interface emphasizes design - and with its modularity, the instructor can adjust the programming challenge as needed.

Instrumentation Laboratory
The primary facility devoted to freshmen engineers, the instrumentation laboratory, consists of core, multipurpose workstations that are modular in construction with inter-changeable components. Each workstation is equipped with a Macintosh Centris 650, National Instruments GPIB boards, general-purpose test equipment, Ethertalk connections, and software, including LabVIEW for graphical programming.

Computer Laboratory
Students are first introduced to LabVIEW in the computer lab of the ED&L course. The software package was originally selected to run computerized experiments in the lab. However, its appeal to engineers compelled us to also use it as an introductory vehicle to the art of computer programming. The graphical nature of LabVIEW virtual instruments (VIs) shifts the programming emphasis from syntax to design, a primary focus for students in this course. The exposure to LabVIEW is spread over a span of 10 weeks.
The first practicum in LabVIEW deals with the front panel - controls and indicators, data types available, numeric controls and setting ranges, mechanical actions of the Boolean controls, and cosmetic editing. The practicum closes with a competition - to design the front panel of a waveform calculator, which will be used later in the course. Subsequent topics in the course include the block diagram, the select block and case structures, the formula nodes, For Loops and While Loops, sequence structures, and modular programming.

LabVIEW in the Engineering Lab
The goal of the Engineering Lab is to familiarize students with the building blocks of a modern measurement environment where transducers are used to measure different physical quantities. The typical workstation has an oscilloscope, a multimeter, a wave-form generator, a universal counter, and a power supply to facilitate measurements with different transducers.
There are four types of experiments performed in this lab:

• Familiarizing students with equipment
• Introducing basic electrical circuitry
• Introducing transducers and their functions
• Showing how the computer is used to control the experiment

LabVIEW makes it easy to show how the computer is used to control the experiment - with its instrument drivers, we put together different experiments quite effortlessly. The modularity of LabVIEW helps the students test ideas before implementing an experiment with hardware. For example, when we ask students to design a heater control system, we first give them a subVI that will simulate the heating process. After we are sure their controller works adequately, we replace the subVI with one that controls the actual hardware. This precaution saves us many burnt oven resistors every year.

Our experience with LabVIEW in our introductory courses has shown us that programming can be fun. Students are introduced to the same concepts they would encounter if they learned text-based programming languages, yet with the graphical nature of LabVIEW, students can grasp the concepts without being distracted by syntax. The attendance in the practicum periods is not only high, but lively. With LabVIEW, we can involve freshmen in the design of computer-controlled labs rather than making them sit and watch. This facilitates more active participation, giving the students an ownership in the lab and increased enthusiasm.

For more information, contact:

 Murat Tanyel, Ph.D.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Drexel University

32nd and Chestnut, Philadelphia, PA, 19104

Tel: (215) 895-4931

Fax: (215) 895-5863

E-mail: tanyel@cbis.ece.drexel.edu.

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