Engineering institutes and colleges in developing countries need a low-cost solution for data collection and management applications. The only solutions available are proprietary and often expensive, at least for the industry. As a result, students who are only educated on software for propriety find themselves "handicapped" when entering the industry.
Since the required driver information for many popular devices is not available, you have to rely on compliance data collection and management systems. The Control and Measurement Device Interface of Linux projects [COMEDI, 2012] contains drivers for many popular devices and thus helps to partially solve this problem. Recognizing the importance of drivers in the public domain, some governments have also begun to include this requirement in their procurement policies [Committee, 2011]. Our group also attempted to access the hardware using open-source software [Arora et al., 2010, Moudgalya and Arora, 2010, Arora et al., 2011]. However, as far as we know, not much effort has been made to find an open-source equivalent to a complete data collection and management system such as LabVIEW [NI, 2012].
This article focuses on creating an open-source alternative for LabVIEW using GNURadio [2012], Scilab [2012], Xcos [Scilab, 2012], OpenCV [2012], and COMEDI [2012], all of which are open-source software. While some programs, such as Scilab, can run on many platforms, some others, such as COMEDI (Control and Measurement Device Interface), only work on Linux. By the very nature of open-source software, it is possible to integrate many other open-source software systems and further extend the capabilities of the solution proposed in this paper.
This document is structured as follows. Section 2 briefly describes GNURadio. Section 3 describes how we integrated open-source libraries and packages into GNURadio. In Section 4, we explain how we interacted with the single board heating system (SBHS) via USB and via Scilab and COMEDI. Section 5 compares the GNURadio solution with LabVIEW and points out the necessary improvements.