Objective
Develop a proof-of-concept for a Raspberry Pi 4-based data acquisition platform. This platform utilizes the Pi 4’s flexibility to support multiple different sensors.
Background
The Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering at Washington University is currently re-evaluating the curricula of Electrical Engineering and Systems Engineering majors. Revisions are underway for courses such as Signals and Systems (ESE 351) to ensure students are provided with the foundations to succeed post-graduation.
These changes are accompanied by the adoption of the Raspberry Pi 4. Currently, the Pi 4 is a hardware platform for Introduction to Engineering Design (ESE 205) and is also being piloted in the laboratory component of Introduction to Electrical Circuits (ESE 230). In these use cases, the Pi 4 serves as a data acquisition device when operated in tandem with user-determined sensors and has proven to be a powerful and easily upgrade-able microprocessor.
It is for this reason that the ESE department is considering adoption of the Pi 4 in the various other teaching laboratories as a sensor platform, in addition to courses with applied exercises / case studies such as Signals and Systems (ESE 351). In particular, a single Pi 4-based sensor platform, manipulated through a MATLAB GUI, could be deployed in multiple courses for data collection and processing purposes, minimizing the need for proprietary –and usually expensive—equipment and software. Furthermore, the Pi 4’s versatility has been extensively documented by hobbyists, engineers and university faculty across the globe. This means that a Pi 4 based platform deployed in the ESE department would also be user-serviceable and upgradeable, a feature whose absence in commercial instrumentation and software packages dooms them to planned obsolescence (and the ESE department to extremely expensive instrumentation replacement costs every couple of years).
What’s the Innovation?
The Pi 4 is already used in many ESE courses, and many ESE students are already familiar with this microprocessor. This will minimize the logistical overhead of widespread adoption of a Pi 4-based sensor platform.
Manipulating our platform through a GUI is highly advantageous. First, the GUI provides a single “plug-and-play” interface for choosing sensors and collecting and visualizing acquired data. In today’s workflow, operating multiple sensors requires launching (or writing) multiple scripts, which is highly time consuming. Our platform eliminates this requirement by consolidating all peripheral operations into a single GUI.
Basing the GUI on MATLAB also makes our platform “open-source” to either students or instructors. Because MATLAB is the primary scientific computing package of instruction in ESE, the intended users of this platform will also be knowledgeable enough to fix bugs, introduce new features and add support for additional sensors in the GUI themselves. This is a key advantage over consumer solutions, which use proprietary, unchangeable software.
Finally, the cost of the platform itself is a major advantage. The Pi 4 and sensors used in our proof-of-concept will total less than $200 (See Bill of Materials for specific cost breakdowns).
To summarize, no data acquisition platform as user friendly or cheap as our proposed project currently exists, to the best of our knowledge. Even if such a platform were to exist, the platform we designed is tailored specifically to the needs of the WashU ESE department.
Key Points:
- Multiple sensors and their complementary software suites are currently used in ESE laboratory courses for data acquisition purposes. However, learning to use these different sensors and their accompanying applications takes substantial amounts of time. Furthermore, these applications are not user upgrade-able once obsolete or when bugs are discovered.
- A platform which can control multiple sensors from a single user interface will maximize student productivity in the lab and minimize overhead. Making it open-source will future-proof the platform by allowing new features and bug-fixes.
Read about our design here.