A new virtual-instrumentation-based experimenting environment for undergraduate laboratories with application in research and manufacturing

An undergraduate laboratory based on a functionally complete set of virtual tools for laboratory experimenting is described in the paper. An outstanding feature of the experimenting environment is an easy-to-use, graphical user interface to a laboratory experiment. If significantly shortens the time needed to implement experimenter-defined laboratory procedures and eliminates the need for high-level-language programming on the experimenter side. Taking advantage of industry-wide standards such as VISA, GP-IB, and VXI, our virtual instruments can perform their function using either physical or simulated, local, or remote and network-distributed instruments coming from a variety of different manufacturers. A paperless laboratory with on-screen graded measurement reports was fully implemented. The environment as-is allows remote experimenting-world-wide in principle. It currently requires a remote LabVIEW/sup TM/ or XWindow/sup TM/ session. Work is in progress on giving full access to our virtual tools using Java/sup TM/-capable web browsers such as Netscape/sup TM/, Hot Java/sup TM/, or MS Explorer/sup TM/ and thus to provide students with a student-affordable remote experimenting platform.