The US-headquartered National Instruments is a pioneer in virtual instrumentation and its LabView application is used worldwide for the rapid prototyping of measuring instruments. The company has always had a strong educational outreach in India and has created special tools for students where they can breadboard a variety of projects - and then smoothly morph them into real world instrumentation. Their flagship educational platforms are called the NI Educational Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Suite (NI ELVIS). It provides a modular teaching platform that merges hardware, software and courseware for topics such as electronics, mechatronics and communications. Some 12 Instruments are integrated into 1 device: Students can build technical expertise 'creating' an oscilloscope, digital multi-meter, function generator, signal analyzer and other test equipment. NI recently made an addition to the ELVIS platform: the RIO Control Module. RIO stands for reconfigurable Input Output. Students can work with real-time embedded processors and FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) and they are only one step away from what the professionals do -- a great way to bridge the gap from learning theory to applying these concepts to real-world applications. ELVIS costs close to a lakh, so it is for colleges rather than individuals.
—IndiaTechOnline
