LabVIEW
Distant Learning project
Good Morning All,
I am currently working on a limited budget for a small non-profit science museum, the ScienCenter in Ithaca, NY http://www.sciencenter.org They have a shake table that they and Cornell University are using in a joint venture to simulate earthquake effects on structures for students and visitors to the museum as part of the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) nees.cornell.edu/basic/home.htm
My role in this is to take Quanser's http://www.quanser.com/english/html/home/fs_homepage.htm LabVIEW drivers to their hardware and build a web inabled user interface to allow both local and web based users run the simulation. The problem we are running into is which way is most effective to make it web enabled, particularly on a limited budget? On the NI site there are examples of "distance learning" LabVIEW programs being used at a number of universities, using CGI scripting, which removes us from the NI Web Server licensing issues. But it also talks about image refresh times of mimutes, rather than something a little more "realtime" and then suggests using LabVIEW's own ability to publish a front panel to the web. My problem is that I have never done the CGI route, and the few times I have done the direct publishing it has been for the original "model" that NI promoted of having a couple of engineers have predifined access to the code running in the factory, to monitor tests without walking from their cubes, not one where an undetermined (and possibly undeterminable!) number of remote users want to try and log on simultaneously. Obviously, in either model only one user actually controls the experiment, but how does the licensing work, at any given level of licensing do the actually "x predefined users" or is it "you can have a maximum of x users" where x is the max allowed by whatever server license you have? How does the number of users effect the actual processing load on the computer hosting the program, bandwidth of the web server, etc. Have any of you done anything like this, who would I get a hold of to (or my customer) at NI to determine if they qualify for academic discounting (this is a joint venture with Cornell, but this part is being done through the museum and their grant isn't very large)? Additionally, do any of you know anybody that might have done this at the ones shown in the NI article: http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/3301 ?
Thanks all!
I am currently working on a limited budget for a small non-profit science museum, the ScienCenter in Ithaca, NY http://www.sciencenter.org They have a shake table that they and Cornell University are using in a joint venture to simulate earthquake effects on structures for students and visitors to the museum as part of the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) nees.cornell.edu/basic/home.htm
My role in this is to take Quanser's http://www.quanser.com/english/html/home/fs_homepage.htm LabVIEW drivers to their hardware and build a web inabled user interface to allow both local and web based users run the simulation. The problem we are running into is which way is most effective to make it web enabled, particularly on a limited budget? On the NI site there are examples of "distance learning" LabVIEW programs being used at a number of universities, using CGI scripting, which removes us from the NI Web Server licensing issues. But it also talks about image refresh times of mimutes, rather than something a little more "realtime" and then suggests using LabVIEW's own ability to publish a front panel to the web. My problem is that I have never done the CGI route, and the few times I have done the direct publishing it has been for the original "model" that NI promoted of having a couple of engineers have predifined access to the code running in the factory, to monitor tests without walking from their cubes, not one where an undetermined (and possibly undeterminable!) number of remote users want to try and log on simultaneously. Obviously, in either model only one user actually controls the experiment, but how does the licensing work, at any given level of licensing do the actually "x predefined users" or is it "you can have a maximum of x users" where x is the max allowed by whatever server license you have? How does the number of users effect the actual processing load on the computer hosting the program, bandwidth of the web server, etc. Have any of you done anything like this, who would I get a hold of to (or my customer) at NI to determine if they qualify for academic discounting (this is a joint venture with Cornell, but this part is being done through the museum and their grant isn't very large)? Additionally, do any of you know anybody that might have done this at the ones shown in the NI article: http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/3301 ?
Thanks all!
Thanks to both of you. We probably will implement LabVIEW's built in web publishing capability with a very limited number of licenses, while I explore the other options. I had been led to believe that the CGI was slow (as well as adding a definite level of complexity) and will look into it more, but time to deployment is starting to be an issue here, they need something on the display floor. Still have to work out all the details about interfacing it and their really cool web cam (this one has its own server, pan, tilt, zoom, probalby going to have to disable those so that someone does have it looking a other parts of the museum) to their web server. Learning new stuff, always fun, even for a "trilobyte" (see my avatar). Of course if there is anyone else that wants to throw their 3 cents worth in (inflation), particularly those with "blue avatars" please do!
Thanks, as always
Thanks, as always
Message Edited by LV_Pro on 04-13-2007 09:40 AM
