Designing and implementing a standalone configurable lab server application.

Abstract

This project was done so as to have laboratory hosting server for online electronics experiments to be conducted by students in large numbers because of the high cost of the many Equipment (National Instruments ELVIS II board hardware) required for each student, Tis project allows sharing of the same equipment among many students in the shortest time possible. National Instruments ELVIS II board hardware is used 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 streams live instrument data available from the experiment and an http web API built using ASP.NET Web API2.0 gets commands during experimentation. Core server applications are embedded in windows service application which for the server to start when the system boots and also runs with high privileges for functionality of all components. A Graphical User Interface 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.