The LAVA hosted Web Instrument

[MariusG]

Key Words: Cloud Instrument, Widget Instrument, Digital Sensor Frame, Temperature Avatar, web feed, Web Instrument.

Any media site that allows visitors to post HTML/JAVA scripts is a free Web Instrument Builder environment for sensor measurements.

You can build your web based instrument for free at blogspot.com or lava.org, or any other web or media site, by using sensor avatars which are representations of sensors as web objects. The Widget Instrument, Digital Sensor Frame, and Temperature Avatar seen at http://www.tag4m.com/ are examples of such objects.

The Widget Instrument is a web based instrument that gets data from one or several sensors via a Cloud Instrument and contains instrument functionality, things like processing, communication and display. A Widget Instrument can be “wired” to other Widget Instruments using a method named web feed. The Cloud Instrument also uses web feeds to send data to widgets. An unlimited number of widget instruments can be “virtually wired” together with no regard to their physical location by using feeds. Web feeds benefit publishers of web instruments and any other specialized content that provides expertise in analysis, data mining, metering, presentation, etc., by letting them syndicate content automatically. Web feeds also benefit instrumentation customers to subscribe to timely updates from sensors via websites and/or to aggregate sensor feeds from many sites into one place. The web feed virtualizes the concept of PC-based LabVIEW wire the very same way LabVIEW wire virtualized the concept of a traditional instrument physical wire twenty years ago.

As an example of a web instrument hosted by LAVA, I will use the HTML capability offered by the LAVA post editor to build a small instrument that contains 3 widgets: 1) a live thermistor connected to channel AI0 of tag1, 2) a current channel connected to the 4-20mA channel of tag2 which is floating, and 3) voltage ch AI1 of tag3 which is also floating.

I am inserting the html code into the LAVA post editor now, so the objects should be displayed bellow under this text. If the objects are not displayed it means that LAVA’s html editor does not support the object insertion, and you can go to http://sensedin.blogspot.com/ and see a sensor based Web Instrument hosted by blogspot.com. Best, Marius.