Instructional Videos Improve the Teaching and Learning Experience with QNET Trainers

QNET trainers and the National Instruments™ ELVIS platform have long been one of the best, most economical ways to learn controls in a LabVIEW™ environment.

We recently introduced an enhanced QNET Resources – a complete set of documentation, courseware and software VIs that comes with each QNET trainer. One of its major enhancements is the addition of a collection of short instructional videos for each of the six trainers.

The videos are designed to guide students and instructors through the QNET set up procedure, but more importantly, to help students get familiar with the entire lab. They walk students through the topics and concepts covered by the QNET curriculum and link them to the practical applications of these experiments, giving students a clear and exciting idea of how the concepts they’re studying will be applied in the real world.  

The VI Overview videos help students with the ins and outs of the virtual instruments, demonstrating the VIs functionality, including potential pitfalls, and useful tools. And for the students new to LabVIEW, another video offers an overview of the basic operations that students will need to successfully perform the lab exercises. 

Watch this video that shows students real-life applications of QNET DC Motor Control experiments:

By using this set of instructional videos, students can grasp the concepts taught in a QNET-based controls course more easily. As a result, students will perform more confidently and independently in the lab, and instructors can make more effective use of their teaching time.

How QNET Trainers Help You Prepare Students for the Working World

Last month I told you about how we have improved the QNET Resources that are available with each of the six QNET trainers. I also briefly highlighted the QNET trainers themselves and their ability to help you teach the basics of servo, process, and task-based control, plus introductory flight control, bio-instrumentation and mechatronic sensing.

In this post, I want to continue the QNET trainers story along two lines: the key control topics they help you teach, and the value of exposing your students to fundamental control principles using industry-relevant LabVIEW^™ graphical programming software.

Teach a Wide Range of Controls Topics

The following chart gives a concise mapping between the QNET boards and several controls topics that are common to the study of control in not only mechanical, electrical, and aerospace engineering, but also computer science, applied physics and bio-engineering.

The NI ELVIS II platform and LabVIEW controllers seamlessly complement the QNET line by directly mapping theory to practice, and offering students the hands-on, practical experience they need to compete and perform in industry today.

QNETs and LabVIEW^™: A Logical Combination That Prepares Undergraduate Controls Students for Industry

At Quanser, a concept we strongly believe in is the “controls education continuum”.  Essentially this continuum encompasses your students’ progress from the lower to upper undergraduate years, through to graduate studies or working in industry.

QNET trainers, in conjunction with the LabVIEW graphical programming environment, occupy a key place in that continuum by offering a modular platform to span a student’s complete academic career.

QNETs cover a wide range of controls topics, while the LabVIEW environment helps students to intuitively bridge the gap between theory and application by intuitively highlighting the direct correlations between the whiteboard and block diagram.

Using LabVIEW, students can learn the essential skills of controls engineering including modeling, control design, simulation, implementation, and operation of a control system from a single environment. The LabVIEW skills they develop by using QNET trainers will be of great benefit when the time comes for the studensty to design controls for more complex plants.

QNET trainers are a highly effective tool for teaching common control concepts to novice, intermediate and advanced engineering and applied science students.   They are designed to fit on the National Instruments (NI) ELVIS II platform.

Using the Quanser Rapid Control PrototypingToolkit, a wide range of advanced Quanser plants from helicopters to shake tables can be integrated quickly and easily into the LabVIEW environment. This enables students to complete a hardware continuum that compliments their progression in controls skills development from the QNET VTOL trainer all the way up to a 2 DOF Helicopter or 3 DOF Helicopter, or from a QNET Rotary Pendulum to a rotary servo-based 2 DOF Inverted Pendulum.

The fact that LabVIEW is widely used all across industry means students can immediately take their practiced programming skills from the academic realm directly to the factory floor. The combination of these two great tools – QNET trainers and the LabVIEW graphical programming environment – thus helps you provide your students with a clear and consistent learning progression, one that effectively prepares them to make an immediate contribution when they enter the challenging world of control systems engineering.

- Peter Martin

Peter Martin is a Curriculum Developer at Quanser

Six Ways We've Enhanced QNETs for Teaching Introductory Controls

I would like to let you know about the latest revision of the QNET Resources — the complete set of documentation, courseware and software VIs that comes with each QNET trainer. To be released this spring, this newest version of the QNET Resources assembles six new features that will mark a significant shift forward for our existing and future QNET customers.

QNET controls experiments can be used for multiple engineering courses, including Electrical, Mechanical, Mechatronics, Biomedical and Aerospace. 

The New QNET Resources Delivers an Enhanced User Experience

Our focus for the new revision of the QNET Resources was to improve the usability and efficacy of the software, documentation and courseware for teaching undergraduate controls. The changes we've made include not only revisions to the existing courseware and documentation, but new material as well. Some of the improvements include:

1. A collection of instructional videos provided for each QNET trainer
• They save professors’ teaching time while helping students quickly grasp the capabilities of each QNET trainer. The videos cover initial setup, curriculum structure, real-life applications and more.
2. Updated, ABET-aligned courseware
• This ensures that the courseware is comprehensive and includes detailed assessment guidelines.
3. Individual setup material, Quick Start Guides and VIs for each trainer
• Faster, easier setup of each QNET experiment.
4. Cleaner-designed VIs
• This makes them easier to understand and see how the theoretical block diagrams relates to the actual implementation.
5. Additional lecture materials, including Powerpoint slides
• They work to help professors introduce the labs in their lectures.
6. Additional documentation updates and revisions
• They improve the look and feel of the courseware.

 The new QNET Resources will be released this spring and will offer added value to professors and students alike.  

Quanser QNET Trainers: Helping Professors Teach Introductory Controls For A Decade

The Quanser/National Instruments Engineering Trainers, or QNETs, were introduced almost 10 years ago as a series of hardware platforms for teaching a variety of undergraduate controls concepts. The boards were designed to snap into the ELVIS I data acquisition (DAQ) board developed by National Instruments (NI).

You can choose from six different Quanser QNET trainers for the NI ELVIS II workstation.

Over the years, we’ve made several updates to the platform.  We added new and innovative trainers, improved performance, and made the virtual instruments (VIs) and documentation more user-friendly. Today, a total of six diverse trainers for the NI ELVIS II DAQ are found in undergraduate engineering labs around the world.  They cover the basics of servo, process, and task-based control, as well as introducing students to flight control, bio-instrumentation and the sensors used in mechatronic systems. Using them gives undergraduate students experience working on challenging and industrially-relevant problems that can be applied to current and future technology. They help educators teach effectively even as their relatively small footprint optimizes lab space.

To learn more about our QNET offerings, click here.  And stay tuned to this blog for upcoming posts about the six individual QNET trainers.

 - Peter Martin

Peter Martin is a Curriculum Developer at Quanser