Comunidad Estudiantil de LabVIEW
Contact Information
University and Department: UPC.EPSEVG, Electronic Engineering Dpt.
Team Members:David Sarri
Faculty Advisors:Joaquin del Rio
Primary Email Address: David.Sarria@upc.edu
Project Information
Project Title: Marine Species Monitoring using LabVIEW
List all parts (hardware, software, etc.) you used to design and complete your project: LabVIEW 8.5, Vision, NI-IMAQ and Diadem
Describe the challenge your project is trying to solve.
Design and control of a data acquisition and image system for the study of marine species in the laboratory, capable of working for months and applying different configuration parameters automatically for analyzing and presenting data collected.
The study of population and activity of marine species has acquired in recent years a great interest in order to control fishing activities and ensure sustainable exploitation. In these investigations it is appropriate to have a system in laboratory that allows recreate different conditions in a controlled manner. This enables the extraction of more accurate data on the species, significantly reducing waiting times to process the data.
The work presented here solves the gap, allowing you to work with data from the same time they are generated (different experiments can last for weeks or even months), accelerating the analysis and interpretation of results.
Describe how you addressed the challenge through your project.
Developing an application in LabVIEW 8.5 that controls in parallel the different instruments that make up the system, all with USB interfaces. The data obtained are processed and reported in another National Instruments application, Diadem.
The application runs on a portable computer ( 1.7GHz Centrino processor, 1GB RAM and Windows XP OS) and controls the entire system. Since the equipment is in the same place where experiments are conducted and is not accessible during the experiments, the LabVIEW Web Publishing Tool was used to monitor and control the system remotely.
The system consists of three different instruments: acquisition, lighting and webcam unit. They have been replicated twelve times to run twelve experiments at the same time.
The application has an open architecture, new instruments of the same type can be connected without being necessary to modify the source code. Limiting devices is set by the USB specification, 127 devices.
Once the experiment starts, the application sends to the modules of lighting the intensity to be applied and makes a request to the data acquisition. It receive the signal of 64 sensors connected (photodiodes), which are responsible for notifying the presence and location of the species in the study area. Given the structure, the twelve acquisition modules work concurrently returning to the equipment the final value of 768 sensors, all them with a response rate of 150ms (maximum theoretical limit). However, such speed is not necessary (the species does not move at high speed) and is scheduled every five seconds.
The collected data are stored on the computer under an organized file structure, which facilitates further processing and management. Files are sent remotely to another application that processes it. With the LabVIEW Internet tools it was possible to easily implement the communication, which allowed us to improve and reduce the study of data in a few weeks.
The second application is on a remote computer and is responsible for processing the data through algorithms developed with LabVIEW. Raw and processed data are presented in reports for interpretation by National Instruments Diadem.
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