To meet the growing demand of industry and academia, the university emphasizes automated data acquisition, instrumentation, and process control. In addition to supporting the needs of Engineering Technology majors, the extended interdisciplinary course offering in these areas provides instructional and practical training to physical science majors as well. Major equipment includes four personal computers with data acquisition and GPIB plug-in cards, as well as visual programming software for analysis and data presentation. These four networked stations are being used to introduce automated data acquisition, high-speed instrumentation employing the GPIB bus, and process control. The project enhances students' theoretical and practical abilities in terms of how to sense real-world quantities such as temperature, force, motion, sound, light, etc., and also how to configure, use, interface, and integrate such sensors to a personal computer (PC) based system. This also provides students with the tools needed not only to sense but also to control physical phenomena or devices. The new use of graphical programming language makes their task of displaying the results, analyzing the data, and performing mathematical and statistical calculations less tedious and permits them to devote more time in learning about instrumentation and control and less time in programming. While performing experiments, students see the necessity and usefulness of the techniques of grounding, shielding, signal conditioning, noise-filtering, hardware and software interfacing, etc., in a unified manner. The integration of theoretical and practical aspects learned by the students in several courses prepares them better to meet with the technological challenges of the industry.
