National Instruments Summer Internships: LabVIEW programming.

Car Dashboard
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Project aims
To create and develop fun ways to teach and familiarise students with programming and the LabView environment.

Labview Clock

How this was achieved

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This was a project that was aiming to teach students how to use and program LabView with the end result as a virtual Car Dashboard. The car dashboard helps to teach key LabView and programming concepts in an fun an easy to understand way. The exercises go through loops, case statements and timing while also explaining how variables can be linked together to calculate the rpm, torque and horsepower.

We created a series of exercises that provided a step by step approach to developing fun projects in Labview. The projects were designed so that they would be interesting to first year students and would encourage them to try the exercises in their spare time.

The LabView alarm clock was a project that aimed to teach students concepts ranging from the basic (opening a new LabView project) to the advanced (Arrays, case structures). When the exercises are completed the resulting project is a fully functional alarm clock that utilizes a seven segment display, and has alarm and snooze functions. I tried a variety of ways to deliver these exercises and settled on providing them in a PDF format with step by step instructions. These instructions would be accompanied by finished LabView projects so that they could use it as a reference.

Whack-a-mole game.
Our final project was the idea of teaching LabView via a playable game that the students could build from scratch. The game we decided to create was based on the classic "Whack a mole" game except instead of moles, we used pictures of first year lecturers! The game utilizes the keyboard or custom built I/O board to "hit the moles". Points are awarded for a successful hit and points are deducted for a miss. The game also has a 5 level system that changes the difficulty of the game. We also decided to add a "Most whacked lecturer" statistic so that players of the game could see which lecturer they hit the most.

National Instruments Summer Internship Projects School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering The University of Manchester

Project carried out by: Thomas lloyd and Koye Sodipo E-Mail: bankole.sodipo@student.manchester.ac.uk Thomas.lloyd-3@student.manchester.ac.uk Supervisors: Danielle George and Peter Green E-Mail: Danielle.George@manchester.ac.uk & p.r.green@manchester.ac.uk