Teach Concepts Interactively with LabVIEW SignalExpress
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Today’s Teaching Trends: Hands-on Learning
In order to mitigate the challenge of declining enrollment, Educators are now incorporating hands-on, experiential learning techniques into the classroom. By giving students the opportunity to interact with real-world signals and compare the simulation results, educators find that students learn concepts much better. LabVIEW SignalExpress, an interactive environment built on the industry-leading NI LabVIEW Graphical System Design platform helps make hands-on, experiential learning possible for students across multiple disciplines, from biomedical engineering to aerospace engineering and across multiple years, from freshmen to senior with its powerful, interactive, step-by-step approach. Some of the benefits of using NI LabVIEW SignalExpress in the classroom as are follows
Interactively Compare Simulation with Real-World Results
Traditional tools for circuit design do not offer a seamless environment to compare simulation data with real-world signals. With LabVIEW SignalExpress, NI Educational Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Suite (ELVIS) and NI Multisim, the industry-leading SPICE simulation software, educators now have access to a seamless platform from design, to prototyping and comparison of results between the simulation domain and the real world. Figure 1 shows an example of how LabVIEW SignalExpress helps in providing a seamless, completely integrated platform to teach circuits and electronics.
Figure 1. The Electronics Education Platform
For example, one of the basic concepts that every student learns is analysis of RLC circuits. The power of the electronics education platform is demonstrated when this example is applied to it – the students first learn the concepts from leading textbooks. Then they use SPICE simulation and capture software such as NI Multisim to design and simulate the RLC circuit and understand the step response. In order to verify the simulation results, they then prototype the RLC circuit on an NI ELVIS and compare the simulation resuls with real-world data in NI LabVIEW SignalExpress. Hence, the students can now bring theory to life and understand the circuit design concepts better.
Connect to hundreds of instruments and signals with Plug-and-play
Engineering students use various forms of instrumentation to acquire signals - such as the new generation of Modular Instruments (as shown in figure 1), traditional instruments such as Oscilloscopes, DMMs, Function generators as well as hundreds of other customized instrumentation in emerging areas such as biomedical engineering and nanotechnology.
Figure 2. Modular Instruments
NI LabVIEW SignalExpress provides an idea framework to connect to thousands of instruments, both traditional and modular instrumentation via multiple buses such as GPIB, USB or Serial. This enables students from multiple disciplines to now interactively analyze and report data instead of having to manually save to a floppy or USB drive and then post-process the data. In addition, because students can now interactively analyze the data, they can perform analysis on-the-fly. This enables them to analyze the system faster and make adjustments in real-time.
Analyze Data interactively
LabVIEW SignalExpress is a completely interactive environment. This means that the student does not have to wait to build the whole system before running it. For example, traditionally, if the student had to acquire a signal and apply an FFT to it, he or she would have to write a program that performs the complete process and then run it , evaluate the results and tweak the system. With LabVIEW SignalExpress, the student now has the option to add and tweak analysis and other functions while acquiring data from the sensor. Figure 3 shows an example where the system is acquiring data while an interactive alignment is being performed.
Figure 3. Performing Analysis Interactively
Because the student can now interactively analyze data, he or she can understand the nuances of the various concepts better. For example, the difference between an IIR filter or an FIR filter, the effect of topology choices for a filter and other concepts. In the traditional methods, this would have taken a long time because the student has to build the whole program, run it, then change the function, and recompile and run it again to understand the changes.
Generate Interactive Reports
One of the critical pieces in a homework or project is the report the students have to submit to the professor or TA in order to get the grade. Traditional techniques required creating images from graphs and using multiple tools to create a report. LabVIEW SignalExpress, for the first time, provides a simple interface to create interactive reports. Interactive reports, in addition to text and tables, include dynamic charts and graphs that show the data acquired and analyzed. Figure 4 shows an interactive report that is created in LabVIEW SignalExpress
Figure 4. LabVIEW SignalExpress Report Generation
Extend to Research using NI LabVIEW with Automatic Code Generation
The classroom is an important piece in helping students understand and learn concepts. Another important aspect of education is application of concepts to research. Research forms the basis of all innovation and is based on a lot of the fundamental concepts that are taught in classrooms. Additionally, graphical programming languages such as NI LabVIEW with the ability to now target multiple hardware platforms such as FPGAs, DSPs and Embedded boards are fast becoming the de facto standard for research in academia. Researchers now have access to a completely graphical programming language to design, prototype and deploy their system.
Because NI LabVIEW SignalExpress is based on NI LabVIEW, research students can now extend their work from areas such as senior design to research projects with automatic LabVIEW code generation as shown in figure 5 and add further functionality.
Figure 5. LabVIEW Code Generation
For example, a student may have designed, simulated and tested a filter using NI LabVIEW SignalExpress and may wish to use this filter and deploy it on an FPGA. He or she may use the automatic code generation feature in LabVIEW SignalExpress and add the required I/O nodes using the FPGA module for LabVIEW and implement the new system on an FPGA. Thus the student has taken the concepts that he or she learn and applied in the classroom and applied it to research seamlessly.
Conclusion
With the continual emphasis to teach concepts in a hands-on, interactive manner, there is a need for intuitive, graphical and interactive tools. NI LabVIEW SignalExpress provides capabilities such as interactive, on-the-fly acquisition and analysis, connectivity to thousands of instruments and the capability to generate interactive reports helping educators teach students theoretical concepts better. In addition, with its foundations based in LabVIEW, NI LabVIEW SignalExpress helps extend the classroom projects seamlessly into research with automatic LabVIEW Code Generation thus letting students focus more on the research project itself and increasing productivity. NI LabVIEW SignalExpress provides an opportunity to enhance the quality of education in the classroom today, interactively.
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