Abstract:

Software engineers (SE) regularly need to use skills beyond their knowledge of basic physics and engineering. Team work, scientific writing, applying engineering concepts to interdisciplinary problems, designing and developing products, and managing complex projects are all acquired skills. Due to the unequivocal fact that software engineering is plural, SE use their knowledge and skills in number‑crunching, simulations and modeling, physics, games, and of more immediate interest, in instrumentation, among many other fields. Instrumentation is typically demanded in manufacturing facilities, process plants, research centers, and in academia. However, many SE would benefit from a wider and deeper knowledge of computational‑analysis tools, particularly industry‑standard packages. For instance, in the electronic test instruments control two packages dominate, namely, MATLAB and LabVIEW. Before their major in software engineering, undergraduate students must take a number of lab assignments that are regularly focused on a variety of analog and digital circuit design experiments. Thus, learning how to use electronic test instruments such as a digital oscilloscope and function generator is just one of the first steps in the engineering lab curriculum; some of them will enter today's electronics industry after they graduate. A number of practical applications of an oscilloscope in the undergraduate lab can be readily found in the literature. With these reasons as a motivation, this paper sets out to use MATLAB for developing a graphical user interface (GUI) to interactively control a digital storage oscilloscope (TDS 2022) via a GPIB‑USB board, and an arbitrary waveform generator (33521A). To this end, the manuscript briefly describes the steps for communicating with the instruments and how to route the electrical signal from the generator to the scope. It also highlights the importance of understanding the underlying physical concepts of instrumentation for connecting a function generator to an oscilloscope accounting for proper impedance matching. The GUI is better suited to non‑engineering majors and users whom might be puzzled by the many knobs and buttons in the front panel of instruments. In time‑consuming processes or in advanced measurements, developing a GUI may be the best approach for reliable data acquisition; a responsibility that commonly rests with SE.

Keywords:

Software engineering, education, MATLAB, GUI, GPIB, LAN, instrumentation, impedance matching.