Problem-solving made easy in upgraded engineering lab

MANILA, Philippines—What happens inside the Ateneo de Manila University’s engineering laboratory has a lot to do with fish survival in the Laguna Lake.

In the lake, student-designed devices are monitoring dissolved oxygen in the water—considered vital for fish’s survival. It is a technology born in a laboratory that provides students the right tools to turn their ideas into reality.

Now AdMU’s School of Science and Engineering (SSE) teaching laboratory will allow students even more opportunities to develop their ideas into promising solutions for various problems with some $57,000 worth of the latest test and measurement hardware and graphical programming software from the American company National Instruments (NI).

AdMU associate professor Nathaniel Libatique, chairman of SSE’s Department of Electronics, Computer and Communications Engineering, said NI had a very good software platform that set a global engineering standard. “They (NI) have software and modular hardware that allows you to slap together solutions very quickly and the way that’s scaled, it could actually be low cost,” Libatique said.

As part of its Planet NI initiative, a global endowment program for engineers initiated two years back, NI granted AdMU-SSE $45,000 worth of equipment, among the world’s topnotch engineering tools used in industry.

Pete Zogas, NI senior vice president of sales and marketing, said in a press conference, “We make tools, we don’t make solutions. We make the building blocks both in modular hardware and in this rapid development software environment.”

Zogas said they put the building blocks in the hands of customers who worked out the solutions. “They could be for smart phones, audio and video, Bluetooth, all those things that have to be tested and the device is put in a box,” he added.

NI equipment at the AdMU include the LabVIEW software, widely used in gaming, audio processing, even smart phone technology; and several training hardware that would allow students to test a range of innovations.

Libatique said AdMU engineering students had designed technologies for rainwater catchment, wastewater filtration, telemedicine and even blood pressure monitoring.

“The lab is designed to enhance the learning experience of the students through projects-based and experiential hands-on learning,” said Celso Co, a SSE professor.

“The use of the laboratory facility and equipment is meant to supplement the current curriculum and create a more engaging learning and teaching environment in which practical training is used to develop the students into more globally competitive engineers,” Co said.

While NI supports engineering laboratories in other Philippine universities, the AdMU laboratory is the first to allow small and medium enterprises (SME) to test out their designs.

“It gives the entrepreneur the ability, for free or almost free, to develop their solutions,” said Chandran Nair, NI managing director for Southeast Asia.

NI, an almost $1-billion US firm, has partnered with universities in developing countries in Latin America and parts of Asia for the Planet NI initiative in hopes of “empowering engineers and students … to achieve economic prosperity and sustainable development through technology access and education.”

Nair said the company was keen to pursue similar partnerships with other Philippine universities and SMEs as part of the Planet NI mission.

“Buoyed by the successful partnership with AdMU, we have plans in the immediate horizon to identify more academic institutions or local small and medium enterprises to launch similar Planet NI initiatives in the Philippines and around the region,” Nair said.