Enhancing Engineering Education With Web Based Instrumentation Design Projects

An engineering instrumentation design project assignment has been enhanced and improved using distributed internet-based data acquisition systems and web-based data dissemination. Students design, develop, and install an instrumentation system to collect data on an aspect of the operation of an on-campus building. Past instrumentation systems have included measurements of airflow through ducts, power consumed by vending machines, and energy waste in an overheated room. Measurement data is collected by National Instruments FieldPoint® data acquisition systems, analyzed by National Instruments LabVIEW® software, and published to the World Wide Web by a customized publishing system. LabVIEW® software provides student design flexibility for public presentation of their system data. Raw and reduced data are saved, once per minute, by LabVIEW® as jpeg snapshots of the project’s Virtual Instrument front panel. Students construct a website for their project using a customized weblog authoring system. The dynamic jpeg images are automatically uploaded to the weblog, thereby providing real-time readouts of building data. A design proposal, complete with schedule and costs, is submitted and reviewed by the professor. Periodic progress reviews and a final review are conducted. Because students interact with their immediate environment, because data are publicly available on the internet, and because they are involved with cutting-edge technology, students display increased levels of personal investment and self-motivation in the projects. Individualized project assessment by the professor provides opportunities to discuss the design process, the differences between as-designed and as-built systems, the importance of meeting cost and schedule constraints, and the challenges of developing continuously-operating, realworld systems.