CALIsys (which I believe stands for “Computer Aided Laboratory Instruction system”) was a project I worked on in its early stages during the summer of 2003. The goal of the project was to come up with a program that allowed engineering students to put a lab together virtually on the computer, and then to take readings once they connected the physical lab equipment together.

The first prototype had been written in LabVIEW 6.1 using G before I joined the project (G is a graphical programming language developed by National Instruments for its LabVIEW software). The prototype had a single experiment hard-coded into the program which had a rather limited interface: you could choose what equipment to use for the virtual lab, but only correct equipment was selectable and, once selected, its position on the diagram was fixed.

I started by working off of the prototype, thinking of ways to generalize the experiment diagram and came up with a grid interface. This would simplify the interconnections between equipment, while letting teachers designing the experiment and students running it to move the equipment around relatively freely.

I had gotten pretty far on implementing the experiment creation interface and started on the student view when we decided that the G version was probably not the way to go. My fellow programmer, who was working to get LabVIEW’s Visual Studio components up and running in our lab and tackling the problem from C++, started making some significant headway in that direction. So, since a traditional text-based programming foundation would be better for the future growth of the project, we laid my work to the wayside and redirected our efforts. I was sorry to leave the project, but I believe my interface for creating experiments, as well as my overall design work, helped with the C++ version.