NI ELVIS Has Entered the Building

Hands-On Laboratory Provides Real-World Electronics Experience

Westwood’s new NI ELVIS won’t slick back its hair, don a sequined cape, or swivel its hips while belting out a soulful rendition of “Hound Dog.” Instead, NI ELVIS—the Educational Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Suite—will offer students practical, hands-on experience with instruments that electronics professionals commonly use on the job.

NI ELVIS is an integral part of Westwood’s new Electronics program. More than 60 percent of the core contact hours for the associate degree in electronics technology will be delivered in an interactive lab equipped with NI ELVIS workstations and NI Multisim circuit simulation software.

Learning Real-World Skills

“Using NI ELVIS, students will gain engineering intuition on how to build electronics and then measure, characterize, and troubleshoot the performance of analog and digital electronics,” explained Bhavesh Mistry, general manager of National Instruments. “NI ELVIS is built on industry-standard NI LabVIEW technology and integrates to the design technology (NI Multisim SPICE simulation) used by professional engineers today. The result is a teaching platform that will engage students, while also ensuring students are building the real-world analysis skills that are so critical to their day-to-day jobs.”

Virtual Instrumentation, Real Data

NI ELVIS includes 12 of the most commonly used electronics laboratory instruments—including an oscilloscope, a digital multimeter, a function generator, a dynamic signal analyzer, an arbitrary waveform generator, a Bode analyzer, and more—all in one hardware platform.

With NI ELVIS, students can design, test, troubleshoot, and debug circuits using virtual instrumentation that allows them to view real electronics data on their personal computers..“Thiscomputers. “This approach ensures that students focus their time and attention on learning the critical measurement and analysis skills that are needed in the real world but have the intuitive ease of use of a platform made for the laboratory,” added Mistry.

Where is NI ELVIS?

NI ELVIS-equipped labs are available at six of Westwood’s 14 campuses across the United States:

• Atlanta Midtown campus in Georgia
• Atlanta Northlake campus in Georgia
• Inland Empire campus in California
• Los Angeles campus in California
• Annandale campus in Virginia
• Arlington Ballston campus in Virginia

Equipped with 10 computers and 10 NI ELVIS workstations, each of the six new labs accommodates up to 20 students.

Thank You. Thank You Very Much.

The new NI ELVIS-equipped labs represent a worthwhile financial investment for Westwood. According to Stephen Wilson, the Westwood product manager who worked with industry experts to design the degree program and roll it out to the six Westwood campuses, it is an investment in students’ futures.

“The field of electronics is developing at such a fast rate and more and more devices in the average home are becoming networked,” explained Wilson. “The workforce will need technicians who can diagnose and repair electronic equipment, and Westwood is poised to train students to excel in this field.”

Westwood is currently enrolling students in the new associate degree program. For more information, please view here.

Watch a video demonstration of how students can use NI ELVIS to learn the concept of active filtering.