Hi SparkFun community! My team (consisting of students and professors from the University of British Columbia) has been working on a project called Labspire, a cloud platform for remote (as in, fully remote) electrical test & measurement automation. We are currently trying to test out our beta release, and we’d love for both hobbyists and professionals within SparkFun to try out our platform and give us some feedback!
Here’s a video that summarizes what we do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo55EzmQtgg&t=6s
Some background on our project:
One thing we’ve observed over the past year while working remotely is how outdated electronics tests and measurements are being conducted today. Many people still rely on expensive vendor software like LabVIEW to conduct their experiments, and to gain remote access, they have to set up dedicated VPN or remote desktop connections that are often slow and overkill. While there are other projects that use Python and other higher-level languages to address this, we’ve found that many of them require a unique combination of both hardware and software expertise to get started.
That is why we created Labspire, a consolidated web platform that provides both a Jupyter web environment and a remote control API that will allow you to talk to your lab equipment through the web. We emphasized ease of setup and usage so that it takes minimal knowledge for a user to get up and running with a remote lab station.
Our setup works like this: you connect a Raspberry Pi to your lab instruments, then using our custom-built image, you can connect to our cloud platform and interface with it through Python inside our Jupyter framework. Work with your oscilloscope, function generator, or any remote-controllable instruments from the comforts of your own home!
What you could test out right now:
We have some physical demos (oscilloscopes, function generators, etc.) available for you to interface with, just follow the video guides or our Wiki for more information.
Alternatively, if you have your own equipment and a Raspberry Pi sitting at home, you can install our custom images and connect them to our cloud platform.
Links:
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Our landing page: www.labspire.com
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Forums: https://labspire.boards.net
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Wiki documentation: https://wiki.labspire.com
You can also find out more about one of our demos on [Hackster.io and learn more about us there. Please let us know of any issues/feedback either below or directly. Thanks and happy testing!](Labspire - Hackster.io)