iLab Elvis experiment at MIT
The National Instruments Educational Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Suite (NI ELVIS) is a LabVIEW-based design and prototype environment for university science and engineering laboratories. NI ELVIS consists of a LabVIEW-based virtual instrument suite, a multifunction data acquisition (DAQ) device and bench-top workstation with a prototype board. NI ELVIS functions as a three-part system. The ELVIS workstation interfaces with National Instruments LabVIEW software and an NI data acquisition (DAQ) device to perform measurements and transmit signals.
The ELVIS workstation can be manipulated by users either from the built-in control panel located on the front of the workstation, or programmatically through the included NI ELVIS software suite. The workstation also comes with a removable prototype board with over 2800 tie points. This board can be used to build electrical circuits and connect them to the programmatically controlled instruments that come with ELVIS. In addition to variable power supplies that are included in the instrument suit, the board also offers built in 15 Volts and +5 Volts power supplies, which can be used to build a wide array of circuits.
The NI ELVIS iLab project was born when students and faculty from Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) in Nigeria, who had come to MIT over the summer of 2005, were given a donation of an ELVIS board and LabVIEW software to take back to Nigeria with them. Since then, the iLab Africa team at MIT has been working closely with them to develop new content and iLabs based on the ELVIS platform.
The goal of the ELVIS iLab project is to use the ELVIS platform as a launching pad for guiding future iLab software development efforts in Africa, while enhancing the collaboration between MIT and African universities and adding value to the current iLabs architecture. Eventually, the experience accrued from these exchanges should form a basis for enabling OAU to become a hub for the development and deployment of iLabs in Africa.
Portions of introduction above extracted from Samuel Gikandi's Thesis, "ELVIS iLab: A Flexible Platform for Online Laboratory Experiments in Electrical Engineering".
Resources
Below is some information about the ELVIS Lab.
- Detailed Tutorial - An in-depth overview of how to use the ELVIS Lab
- Manual for the ELVIS Lab
- Assignments - Assignments handed out at different schools, based off the ELVIS
- Papers and Theses about the ELVIS Lab
- System Requirements for the ELVIS Lab
- Device Specifications of the devices typically found in the ELVIS Lab
Contact
For more information about the Microelectronics Device Characterization Lab please contact Jim Hardison (hardison@mit.edu) or Jesus del Alamo (alamo@mit.edu).