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A LabVIEW-based soundcard interface for e-laboratory

Ţepelea Laviniu 1 , Gavriluţ Ioan 1 , Neamţu Ovidiu 1 , Gergely Eugen 1 , Gacsádi Alexandru 1 1 University of Oradea, Romania

The content of this material does not necessarily represent the official position of the European Union.

Significant paper ideas:

• • • • The purpose of this paper is to present a way to develop a technical e-laboratory for students interested in their continuing training To realize an e-learning laboratory we used

web publishing tool

from LabVIEW The connection between server and remote computer is realized with a VPN software Web publishing tool from LabVIEW allows concurrent access from different remote computers to e-laboratory

E-learning ideas

• • • • John Dewey (1859-1952) had new teaching methods focused on learning-by-doing (experiential learning) Now the Wold Wide Web allows the effective support for collaborative work around the world Most universities have e-learning environments ready to be accessed through the web • For physical experimentation the hardware is most of the times expensive, hard to maintain, and need a specific guidance through the experiment That is the reason of increasing usage of simulators within engineering teaching activities

• • • • But physical experimentation is very necessary in engineering education Now both software simulation and physical experimentation can be integrated within the same computer-based environment, even in the e-learning platform Laboratories are essential part of engineering education; Laboratories bring the course theory alive The general idea behind a remote laboratory is the ability to access hardware from laboratories or workbenches from remote locations by using a popular communication infrastructure like internet.

Remote control technologies in LabVIEW

• • National Instruments LabVIEW, is a premier virtual instrumentation environment where the development of applications is made graphically • Now, virtual instrumentation is used in many places, in industries from automotive to consumer electronics and especially in universities Software and hardware are successfully combined and LabVIEW has become the most popular easy development tool in engineering because of its easy-to-use graphical programming environment

Communication tools:

• • • • LabVIEW built-in Web Server, a DataSocket Server with ActiveX controls G Web Server included in LabVIEW Internet Toolkit Both can realise the communication between virtual instrument (VI) and a remote computer The G Web Server is a stand-alone VI that runs independently of other VIs

Additional applications:

• Commercial software AppletVIEW - a toolkit for LabVIEW made by Nacimiento Software Corporation • The free application LabVNC - also capable to present the virtual instrument remotely

• • The most useful tool for remote experiments in LabVIEW is the Web Publishing Tool It can make all exciting features of virtual instruments, easy achievable anywhere in the world, with the new technology available from National Instruments LabVIEW, named Remote Panels.

• • • With this new feature of LabVIEW, a user can quickly and effortlessly publish the front panel of a LabVIEW application to use remotely in a standard Web browser Once published, anyone on the Web with the proper permissions can access and control the experiment from the real environment Thus, LabVIEW Remote Panels turns a VI with a device connected, into a remote laboratory with no additional programming or development time

A LabVIEW-based interface for soundcard

• • • • We made an example application that uses web publishing tool The VI uses the soundcard from the computer like a cheap data acquisition hardware We can generate an audio signal with different types: sine, square, sawtooth, triangle Separately from Sound Generator, there is a Data Acquisition part who take the data from soundcard, process the signals, displays the signals

Connection through a VPN application

• The TCP/IP protocol has been criticized as having been designed with no thought of security • The most difficult problem is to communicate through a proxy, a router or a NAT device, because web server is situated in a university LAN • A very good solution for this situation is to communicate through a Virtual Private Network (VPN) application • VPN is used to create an encrypted tunnel for the traffic to be sent between the student’s computer and the web server

VPN tunneling through internet Hamachi VPN application

Conclusions

• • • E-learning environment is a high level standard of education for students, to continue their studies anytime at home An easy way to make a remote controlled laboratory in science domain is to use LabVIEW, who can make very easy a web interface to a virtual instrument connected to a real hardware device To resolve the communication between web server and remote computers even passing through a proxy, a router or a NAT device, like in a university LAN, a solution is VPN

Acknowledgment

• This work was supported by Hungary - Romania Cross-Border Co-operation Programme 2007 – 2013, in E-Laboratory Practical Teaching for Applied Engineering Sciences project with number HURO/0901/028

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