Designing and Implementing a standalone configurable lab server application.

Abstract

This project was aimed at developing an online laboratory hosting server for electronics experiments. It uses the National Instruments ELVIS II board as the hardware equipment for hosting electronic circuits under study, connected to the computers via a USB interface. The USB interface enables access to the function generator, oscilloscope and digital I/O which are used by the software on the host computer. A data socket server is used for streaming live instrument data as it is available from the experiment and an http web API built using ASP.NET Web API2.0 is used in receiving commands during experimentation. Core server applications are embedded in windows service application which enables the server to start when the system boots and also runs with high privileges to enable functionality of all components. A GUI application was built using windows presentation foundation (WPF) framework for lab administrator interactions to allow setup of the lab. The result of the project is a windows program installer, which takes a user through installation steps and allows configuring of various parameters for online experiments.