Web-Enabled Lab Data Acquisition System
Role
I proposed and executed the project as an Advanced Systems EngineerProject Goal
As part of a major re-shoring investment, an appliance manufacturer I worked for was building a new design lab and needed to replace the aged and decrepit data acquisition system they used for monitoring experiments. The previous system required manual correlation of the outputs of three different systems, one of which was paper strip chart-based. My colleagues and I worked with a supplier to design a mobile hardware platform that could be attached to an arbitrary Unit Under Test and collect all of the necessary data streams, irrespective of what the details of the experiment was. While specifying the hardware was straightforward, it was less clear how to organize the software for the data collection hardware so that it was most useful to and usable by the average design engineer.Solution
I
developed LabVIEW-based software systems to manage the data collection
tasks and to remotely manage and monitor the design experiments.
The first LabVIEW system ran on each of the data collection fixtures.
It included a project template that would let a novice engineer quickly
describe the requirements and configuration of the experiment. The
template would then configure itself and do a small amount of code
generation. After building and deploying the template, the engineer
could make all of the electrical and network connections and have all of
the software work be taken care of for him. If the experiment was
unusually complex, the template included an execution framework and API
to generically access sensors and actuators on the hardware fixture
without having to develop a new LabVIEW application from scratch.
The second LabVIEW system ran on a server computer and received all of
the data streams from each experiment running in the lab. The server
maintained a database of experimental results and provided a web
interface (using LabVIEW Web Services) to remotely monitor and interact
with experiments from anywhere on the corporate network. The LabVIEW
server software also had connection to certain lab infrastructure, such
as thermal chambers, and could coordinate among multiple experiments to
manage the infrastructure settings to fulfill the
needs
of the experiments. When complete, the project revolutionized the way
that experiments were run and made the entire department dramatically
more productive. Troubleshooting was effectively instantaneous, the need
for complex and costly re-working of data acquisition software for each
experiment was eliminated, and the engineering savings in the first
year alone exceeded $1MM.