Guys, the NI tools are industry standard. IMO NI’s approach of ‘virtual instrumentation’ is a superior approach.
Virtual Instrumentation is the idea that you don’t need a computer in each instrument–you just need one computer which would be a PC, and all the instruments hooked into it. So not only can you use NI toolset to do the actual instrument acquisition and control (even programmatically), but now the data is in the PC…a very convenient place for it to be since you may need to operate upon it or log the data in, say, database or text files.
The real power of NI toolset is the software, hence NI’s old slogan,‘the software is the instrument’. What I think makes sense for makerspace is windows PC, old school box with PCI slots, and a copy of LabVIEW running upon it. You see, LabVIEW is the flagship data acquisition software product that allows users to easily acquire data from instruments and such, and perform whatever operations upon it that they so desire. Its a graphical programming language, and all the big players in the industry are using it, which is why I said it is industry standard.
With the PC and LabVIEW instrumentation setup, you can hook the PC up to just about any instrument. Most lab instruments have GPIB or USB or ethernet on them and there is already a LabVIEW driver available for free out there. These drivers will allow you to programmatically initiate measurement, calibration, settings operations on the device, and move acquired data into PC, even display on screen with dials, graphs, charts, 3D plots, excel dumps, SQL database dumps, really anything you can think of to do with the data. So now you can simply use the setup to take measurements -OR- you can set up complex measurement and control systems where you use the PC to automate such measurements between many devices.
I’m gonna have to force myself not to write a book here, and my little post does not do the topic justice, but the primary takeaway is that mentioned ‘data aquisition devices’ in my first post are exactly what virtual bench is. But we are not limited to just NI data acquisision devices. Traditional instrumentation ALSO can function as data acquisition devices. I think the Tek scope in the lab has GPIB interface. Most digital power supplies have some system for programmatic control for cycling voltages, current limits and such.
You can get cheap ($99) usb cards to get a bunch of general purpose DIO lines. Many vendors sell ‘analog input’ and ‘analog output’ and ‘counter timer’ and ‘digital I/O’ hybrid devices for not very much. All you need to really use all this stuff is a PC running LabVIEW (and maybe a GPIB interface for lab instruments). I think the PC with LabVIEW is where to start with something like this. Then it will become obvious that we need to ensure programmatic control capability on future electronic equipment acquisitions, which is not at all hard to do these days.
