A RIA based virtual instrument platform for test and measurement education

This paper introduces a RIA (Rich Internet Application) based virtual instrument platform that is used for teaching of Test and Measurement on Web. To let students assemble virtual experiments on Internet, a RIA application is developed by us. It is a virtual instrument software breadboard and can hold virtual instrument components dynamically. To realize a Plug-and-Play function of virtual instrument components, an event driven mechanism is proposed to drive virtual instrument components directly, and to form a test and measurement application automatically. To record student's work, a XML script language is used to save the assembling result and to load it later. Three examples, the virtual signal generator, the sound recorder and virtual piano, and the camera control and image capture, are given in the paper to show the method.