A MATLAB GUI for Engineering Education in the Undergraduate Laboratory

Abstract

Physics and engineering combine various subjects and disciplines into one single umbrella. Technology and computer engineers working in electronic instrumentation aim at making measurements quickly, and accurately using skills and knowledge that they mainly acquired at university by means of hands-on lab experiments. Teaching undergraduate students about (1) computer interfacing, and (2) instrument control techniques for collecting and processing data to automate processes are subjects that seldom appear in their curriculum. A computational software package that allows rapid prototyping is MATLAB. In this paper, therefore, we describe a graphical user interface (GUI) developed for controlling commonly available undergraduate lab electronic test instruments. In addition, we move towards the digital signal processing, providing a teaching lesson for biomedical engineering students.