Project Guise: Curricular Introduction And Resources For Teaching Instrumentation (original) (raw)

2007 Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings

Project GUISE (General-purpose, Universal Instrumentation System for Education) is a computer-based laboratory instrument combining LabVIEW virtual-instrumentation software and custom external hardware developed with support of the National Science Foundation under grant DUE 9952292. Descriptions of its development have been previously published. However, an opportunity to use Project GUISE in the curriculum had not yet occurred at that time. It was created expressly to support a senior-level course in instrumentation and measurement systems, but only recently did that course gain sufficient interest and enrollment to be taught. Project GUISE has now had its introduction to the instructional setting; students have used it to create instrumentation applications such as thermocouple thermometers, a weighing scale using an aluminum cantilever instrumented with a strain gage, a displacement-measurement system using an LVDT, and an optically-coupled isolation amplifier. Other experiments (such as design and test of a carrier amplifier and measurement of the common-mode rejection ratio of the Project GUISE instrumentation amplifier) will be available for the next offering of the instrumentation course. Curricular resources written for Project GUISE include tutorials and background information on the subjects of the experiments, a spreadsheet for design of thermocouple thermometers, and a hardware description (including schematics) of the Project GUISE instrument that may be used in conjunction with upperlevel courses in electronics. The proposed paper will describe the curricular introduction of Project GUISE (including student reactions to its use) and accompanying curricular resources and reference materials (including virtual-instrument software). Brief history of project Project GUISE was developed as part of a collection of unique computer-based laboratory instruments with support of the National Science Foundation under grant DUE 9952292. These instruments, combining custom external hardware and LabVIEW virtual-instrumentation software (National Instruments, Austin, TX), were built on the model of Project TUNA, a Bode analyzer developed as a class project in a secondsemester junior electronics course 1. The other instruments developed under this grant were integrated into regular curricular use some time ago; however, Project GUISE was described in earlier work 2,3 but it not introduced into curricular use until 2005 because the course for which it was intended (EENG 4302, Measurement and Instrumentation Systems) did not gain sufficient student interest before then for it to have been offered. Project GUISE instrument hardware Project GUISE is a collection of basic instrumentation-system building blocks. Instrumentation systems are constructed by connecting the appropriate blocks using external cabling and, in some cases, additional external electronic components.