Customer Solutions

Texas A&M University Implements NI LabVIEW DSP in Curriculum

Author(s):

Jeff McDougall, Ph.D., Texas A&M University

Industry:

University/Education

Product:

LabVIEW

The Challenge:

Redesigning freshman electrical engineering laboratory curriculum to provide students with an exciting, hands-on experience for learning basic electrical engineering principles.

The Solution:

Using the National Instruments LabVIEW DSP Module and NI SPEEDY-33 DSP boards to design a robot for teaching electrical engineering concepts.

The Agg-III Bot Frame with SPEEDY-33 Board

The Texas A&M University Department of Electrical Engineering in College Station is growing rapidly. In the last year, the department advanced one spot to 18th in the U.S. News & World Report national rankings and gains ground with plans to add more than 20 new faculty in the next four years. One of the department’s significant challenges is continuing to foster education excellence with the “PlayStation generation.” Students have grown to expect interactive and participatory education, and departments unable to provide an excitement factor are facing challenges in retaining the best and brightest students. NI is teaming up with Texas A&M to design a laboratory that provides freshmen with both an exciting and educational experience.

Capstone Project

Texas A&M electrical engineering undergraduate students participate in a capstone design course in which they “design, build, and test” a new solution or marketable product to demonstrate their hardware and software design proficiency, and many industry leaders are taking note. This year alone, the course has attracted 11 industry-sponsored projects at an average sponsorship of $5,000 per project.

One capstone design project is structured to impact not only the senior design course but also the freshman engineering curriculum at Texas A&M. Through the support of NI, team Speedy-33 has taken on the task of enhancing the laboratory experience for freshman introductory courses. Implementing the new NI LabVIEW DSP Module and SPEEDY-33 DSP boards, team Speedy-33 created a new robot capable of reinforcing basic electrical and computer engineering principles while enhancing the participatory nature of existing laboratory exercises.

The previous nonprogrammable robotic solutions offered little versatility and contained custom hardware tailored to a limited function set. While the old robot offered students a hands-on approach to reinforcing introductory engineering topics, it put an undue burden on freshmen to condition signals and logic to interact with the analog hardware.

With the addition of the LabVIEW DSP Module and SPEEDY-33 DSP boards, team Speedy-33 has taken the freshman electrical engineering experience to a new level. The SPEEDY-33 DSP boards provide an enormous range of functional capabilities with straightforward digital and analog interfaces. Furthermore, the integration of LabVIEW gives students a graphical programming option that produces a disproportional “wow” factor in robot capability.

The only restraint on students, even those with no prior programming knowledge, is their own creativity. The days of complex circuitry and limited design possibilities are over, and the future looks bright for Texas A&M engineering students.

The Agg-NI Bot

Drawing inspiration from the culture at Texas A&M (a population that boasts at least as many pickup trucks as cars), the design team fused form and function to create a tool for learning analogous to the workings of a pickup truck. Their custom hardware features a buffer board for the digital inputs and outputs to the SPEEDY-33 DSP board. The SPEEDY-33 and buffer boards form the “brain” of the Agg-NI Bot, which is housed in the cab area of the pick-up. With LabVIEW DSP Module power, the students can load programs onto the digital signal processor, take inputs, and produce outputs to control the motion of the bot in a far more advanced way than previously possible. Next, their design features a sophisticated power supply and regulating board with a built-in battery charger, motor isolation, and overcurrent protection. This power portion of the team’s design fits comfortably under the hood, and, to charge the batteries, the students must connect their transformer to the circuit as if they were jumping it from another car. They position a bumper/sensor board on the bumper to sense contact with an object, triggering a reverse function. Rechargeable batteries, which serve as the fuel for the Agg-NI Bot, are located under the belly of the bot analogous to the gas tank in most trucks. Last, a solderless breadboard is available to the student in the pickup bed where he/she connects his “load” for the week’s lab.

The Power of LabVIEW

The infusion of LabVIEW and the SPEEDY-33 DSP boards into the curriculum has broadened the spectrum of educational topic possibilities. Simply including DSP programming has drastically reduced the need for complex signal conditioning circuits, so the students see only the portions of circuits they are currently studying and leave the rest in the hands of LabVIEW. The ease of use of LabVIEW helped the design team focus student attention for this introductory class on basic circuitry and logical algorithms.

The efficiency LabVIEW offers also has pushed the design team to propose a more comprehensive curriculum than expected of an introductory engineering class. Their new curriculum directs students to build analog and digital timers to navigate specified courses and photo detection circuits to follow lines and sense light intensity. The students program the DSP to conduct phase analysis of an audio signal and follow the signal source as well as build an infrared transmitter and receiver that students can regulate and condition with LabVIEW.

For more information, contact:

Jeff McDougall, Ph.D.

Texas A&M University

Tel: (979) 845-7404

Fax: (979) 845-6259

E-mail: mcdougall@tamu.edu