Randy S. Linebarger DUE 9551776 Oregon Inst of Technology FY1995 $ 27,435 Klamath Falls, OR 976018801 ILI - Instrumentation Project: Engineering Title: Computer-Aided Data Acquisition and Control for Photonics Education Within the last decade there has been a significant increase in the role of computers in the photonics laboratory. The use of computers to perform data acquisition and control of laboratory optical instrumentation, optical image processing, modeling, simulations, numerical analysis and presentation capability, is now standard procedure within the photonics industry. The Laser Optical Engineering Technology (LOET) program has been utilizing computers to accomplish a very small subset of the above mentioned tasks in a number of LOET laboratory classes and with senior projects with only three (3) Macintosh computers for laboratory use by the entire cadre of LOET students. Important experiments that are absolutely essential to a well-rounded optics education simply cannot be performed due to the lack of sufficient computers, data acquisition hardware, and software. Currently, no capability exists to do any optical image processing. The objective of this grant request is to acquire additional computers, CCD cameras, and data acquisition hardware and software that will allow the LOET program to expand its capability to run meaningful lab experiments which routinely use such equipment. In addition, this grant would also allow the LOET students to be exposed to experiments and techniques in optical image processing, an important topic in modem optical engineering. The equipment requested by this grant would be configured within the existing LOET laboratory computer network in such a manner as to be portable from one LOET laboratory to the next. This hardware/software would be utilized in many of the existing LOET laboratory courses, solely for the purposes of undergraduate education in photonics. The results obtained from student laboratory experiments using the above mentioned equipment will be disseminated at both national and regional ASEE and SPIE conferences, as well as in the ASEE Journal of Engineering Technology.
