Remote data acquisition, control and analysis using LabVIEW front panel and real time engine

Students and faculty from South Carolina State University (SCSU) are collaborating with the staff at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI) to allow the SMILEY radio telescope to be accessed and controlled over the SCSU Network and the Internet. National Instruments (NI) LabVIEW software package has been used to design a virtual instrument (VI) for the system that has a front panel that will request a users name and password to either view and/or control the SMILEY. To publish the Web page, students used hypertext markup language, Internet Protocol and a Uniform Resource Locator. The earlier versions of LabVIEW provided a number of VI options such as VI server, data socket server, and Visual Basic and Active X to design and develop modules for remote data acquisition and control, usually in a local network. It also required that both the client and server must have LabVIEW and design and development of modules for remote control using the Internet was more involved. The recent LabVIEW 6.1 version introduced remote front panels to view and control a VI in any Web browser. The objective is to discuss the design, development and testing of VI modules using LabVIEW front panel and real-time engine. This work was funded in part by a PAIR (Partnership Award for the Integration of Research) grant from NASA-MURED to SCSU under NCC 5-454.