ABE-VIEW: Android Interface for Wireless Data Acquisition and Control.

Daniel Jenkins,Ryan Kurasaki

doi:10.3390/s18082647

Abstract

Advances in scientific knowledge are increasingly supported by a growing community of developers freely sharing new hardware and software tools. In this spirit we have developed a free Android app, ABE-VIEW, that provides a flexible graphical user interface (GUI) populated entirely from a remote instrument by ascii-coded instructions communicated wirelessly over Bluetooth. Options include an interactive chart for plotting data in real time, up to 16 data fields, and virtual controls including buttons, numerical controls with user-defined range and resolution, and radio buttons which the user can use to send coded instructions back to the instrument. Data can be recorded into comma delimited files interactively at the user’s discretion. Our original objective of the project was to make data acquisition and control for undergraduate engineering labs more modular and affordable, but we have also found that the tool is highly useful for rapidly testing novel sensor systems for iterative improvement. Here we document the operation of the app and syntax for communicating with it. We also illustrate its application in undergraduate engineering labs on dynamic systems modeling, as well as for identifying the source of harmonic distortion affecting electrochemical impedance measurements at certain frequencies in a novel wireless potentiostat.

Highlights

The app may be used to quickly test and troubleshoot different components and functionalities of other more sophisticated systems that include Bluetooth hardware [24,25,26,27]. It is less suitable for applications where sophisticated data processing is required such as for machine vision, where reliable long-term operation is critical such as in commercially deployed industrial control systems and biomedical devices, or where more than one wireless system needs to communicate simultaneously. In this manuscript we provide a general comparison of ABE-VIEW to conceptualized software tools (Section 1.2), a basic user guide to the networking approach and syntax for communication (Section 2.2) with template source code (Supplemental materials), along with example applications of ABE-VIEW for data acquisition and control of simple systems in an undergraduate engineering lab (Sections 2.3 and 3.2) and for testing/troubleshooting issues in a more sophisticated custom hardware design outfitted with Bluetooth (Sections 2.4 and 3.3)
Since we believe that the app can be a very useful tool for iterative hardware design and testing, we have included a somewhat more detailed description of results using ABE-VIEW with a customized wireless potentiostat device to identify the source of harmonic distortion in AC impedance measurements
To communicate with ABE-VIEW, students used a Bluetooth module (BlueSMiRF Silver) that could be powered from the regulated 5V from Arduino and connected directly to the serial universal asynchronous receiver-transmitter (UART) port, and which includes built-in logic level shifting to work with the 3.3 V logic level Bluetooth radio on board

Summary

Introduction

More software tools are becoming available to directly interface with hardware for managing disparate sensor data over networks [5,6], automate the operation of laboratory instruments [7], and directly manage laboratory experiments [8] Platforms such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi, with highly versatile open-source hardware, friendly development environments, and large communities of users have resulted in massive numbers of highly-customized sensor systems to address needs in precision agriculture [9,10], plant phenotyping [11], particle physics [12], geosciences [13,14], long-term low-power environmental monitoring [15], micro-scale process control [16], and other analytical [17,18,19] and educational [12,20,21,22] applications.

Methods

Results

Conclusion