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An Integrated Course in Programming for Laboratory and Process Control
Conference proceeding   Open access

An Integrated Course in Programming for Laboratory and Process Control

Warren Rosen, Irina Nicoleta Ciobanescu Husanu and M Carr
Association for Engineering Education - Engineering Library Division Papers, p26.192.1
14 Jun 2015
DOI: https://doi.org/10.18260/p.23531
url
https://doi.org/10.18260/p.23531View
Published, Version of Record (VoR)Maybe Open Access (Publisher Bronze),  Open

Abstract

Applications programs C (programming language) Color Industrial development Integrated approach Laboratories Light emitting diodes Microcontrollers Monitoring Range finders Science education Servomotors State machines Students Traffic signals Warning systems
An Integrated Course in Programming for Laboratory and Process ControlThis paper describes an integrated course in programming techniques for controlling laboratoryexperiments and industrial processes. The course is intended to provide first-year engineeringtechnology students a broad overview of available programming technologies. To do this, twoprogramming tools were chosen—the C programming language and LabVIEW. The first half ofthe course is dedicated to C programming. Topics include a brief introduction to computers andprogramming, I/O, data types, expressions and assignments, relational operators, loops andbranching, functions, and arrays. This part of the course is taught in a computer laboratory sothat each student has an individual computer and experimental hardware setup. Every lectureincludes simple exercises (~ 5 minutes each) that are preformed by the students in real time asthe relevant topic is covered. Most lectures are followed by a laboratory exercise. Someexamples of the exercises include building a “traffic light” using a three-color LED, building asimple proximity warning system using an acoustic rangefinder and three-color LED, andcontrolling a servo motor. The laboratory exercises are based on the Arduino microcontrollerplatform. Code::Blocks is used as the development environment. The advantage of usingCode::Blocks is that it supports programming in both standard C and Arduino C, so that thestudents do not need to use a separate tool (e.g., Arduino IDE) to program the microcontroller.The LabVIEW part of the course is dedicated to enhancing students’ understanding ofmonitoring and control processes. Using LabVIEW, students are required to create virtualexperimental set-up as well as create monitoring and control interfaces with a physicalexperiment. In this integrated approach, they are using lab modules similar to those used in the Ccomponent of the course, so that they can evaluate and compare the two approaches, and are alsoable to use them both when needed. Laboratory activities include temperature monitoring andcontrol, sequential exercise such as gate opening and closing, state machine type of exercises andalso complex overarching exercises such as “lottery scheme play”. Besides the scholasticpurposes of these activities, students gain a tremendous hands-on experiences using real-lifeexamples.Students enter the course with little or no formal training in either C or LabVIEW. Expectedoutcomes include the ability of the students to explain and use basic I/O operations, data types,assignments, functions, and simple control statements to develop C and LabVIEW programs forindustrial and laboratory applications, and to use industry-standard development environments.Multiple forms of assessment are used to demonstrate success, including student surveys, courseexams, and homework.

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