University Professor Cuts Lab Setup and Configuration Time by 75 Percent

University Professor Cuts Lab Setup and Configuration Time by 75 Percent 

Learn by doing is an educational approach adopted by Universities around the world to better prepare students for their future careers, especially when it comes to electrical engineering studies. But enabling that “hands on” engineering experience in an educational setting using real, industry standard bench instruments is often easier said than done. The tedious and time-consuming process requires extensive pre-lab setup and tracking of lab instruments—time that could be better spent helping students gain the practical experience they need to thrive in the workplace. Outfitting your university or teaching center lab with the right lab management tool can ensure you simplify the configuration, monitoring and tracking of instruments, while maximizing the time you spend educating the next generation of engineers.

The Electrical Engineering (EE) department of a prominent North American University faced the challenge of how best to manage its undergraduate engineering lab without cutting into actual teaching time. A tenured professor who had worked in the department for many years, found himself overwhelmed by the task. With dozens of test benches in the lab, each equipped with multiple instruments, he was spending increasingly more time manually setting up test benches, configuring and updating instrument firmware, and tracking the lab’s assets for calibration and repair. Every minute he spent pre-configuring the instruments in his lab before starting a class, meant less time he could spend optimizing his lesson plans and teaching techniques for his students.

Redefining Lab Management

For a solution to his dilemma, the EE department turned to Keysight Technologies and its’ BenchVue Lab Management and Control Solution. The software provides centralized control for educators and training center lab managers to seamlessly connect and monitor all instruments within a lab. Built on the BenchVue software platform, the Education Control Collection bundle, it leverages all the same key capabilities, including easy control, data capture, logging, automation, and report generation, without requiring any manual programming. 

BenchVue Lab Management and Control Solution comprises both a Manager application, Client application, and the Education Control Collection. The professor first installed the Manager application on his PC so that it could serve as the main software for centralized control and management. Next, he loaded the Client application on each test bench PC. Using the home dashboard of the Manager application, he then quickly connected all instruments at the individual test benches to the network. The Education Control Collection was also enabled on all bench PCs, allowing students to utilize its powerful control applications.

The software even connected the professor’s non-Keysight equipment to the same LAN network. BenchVue Lab Management and Control Solution supports up to 400 Keysight instruments and up to 100 non-Keysight test instruments compliant with the VISA connection protocol (up to 100 benches in total, each supporting 5 instruments: 4 Keysight and 1 non-Keysight). This flexibility made it easy for the professor to easily configure instruments into his existing lab setup for both Keysight and non-Keysight instruments.

With BenchVue Lab Management and Control Solution successfully installed, the professor used its intuitive graphical user interface and ability to import CSV files, to quickly set up and configure his lab without ever having to touch individual lab instruments. Instead, he configured the measurement settings on all the lab’s instruments at one time using his PC with the Manager application software loaded.

This type of centralized lab control, coupled with the software’s ability to automate monitoring and tracking of both Keysight and non-Keysight lab instruments, enabled the professor to easily track his instrument inventories (Figure 3). He even received email notifications alerting him to their calibration/loaner period status. These capabilities significantly streamlined and simplified his lab management task, freeing him to focus on teaching.