A computer-based measurement instrument for electronic circuit laboratory

For the colleges of electrical, electronic and computer engineering, the electronic circuit laboratory is a foundation course, and the corresponding electronic circuit laboratory is necessary. The measurement instruments are essential for the fundamental electronic circuit laboratory. Nowadays, the computer classrooms are universal in schools, which can provide the computers for students to use. The computer has the features of flexibility and low cost, which can be easily expanded and reconfigured for different applications. Therefore, this paper takes advantage of computers to propose a computer-based measurement instrument for the electronic circuit laboratory. The computer-based measurement instrument is an application of virtual instrument and is made of an embedded platform with DAC (digital-to-analog converter) and ADC (analog-to-digital converter) devices, a computer and the LabVIEW software. The proposed computer-based measurement instrument can work as oscilloscope and signal generator. Finally, an experiment of common-source amplifier is given to verify the functions of the computer-based measurement instrument.