Mixer - Remote Operation

    At Northeastern University, every dorm room may soon be furnished with an industrial-sized mixer, courtesy of Professor Ron Willey and LABTECH's remote monitoring and control.  Since LABTECH first introduced Internet viewing and controlling in 1996, Professor Willey has been working towards his own vision of a virtual  Chemical Engineering lab, where costly, specialized equipment can be observed and operated from desktops in the classroom or dorm room. 

   Professor Willey and LABTECH Support Engineers recently tested LABTECH  Control Version 12 with the lab mixer, a four-foot diameter, five-foot deep unit capable of mixing 470 gallons in one batch.  Professor Willey successfully operated the mixer from various locations on Northeastern's Boston network and LABTECH Support Engineers were also able to operate the mixer from our headquarters in Andover.  What's impressive about the mixing application is just how easy it is to implement remotely.  First, Professor Willey ran LABTECH CONTROL and his mixer-operating setup on a PC in the Chem lab, connected to the University's network.  In the lab, Willey can speed up or slow down the mixer by turning knobs in the VISIONpro window.  Next, Professor Willey copied the VISIONpro document file from the mixer-operating setup and created a text file naming the IP address of the lab computer, and sent both files to LABTECH as e-mail attachments.  At LABTECH, we  placed the files in a VISIONpro directory and we were ready-to-run.  Opening the VISIONpro file, put us in control of the mixer.

   By using Internet video cameras, Professor Willey has also operated the mixer remotely while viewing a real-time video image of the mixture.  This combination of technologies allows student to change mixer speeds and view the resulting changes to the liquid's vortex.

   Note:  Remote viewing is supported when the data acquisition PC is running NOTEBOOKpro, CONTROL, or CONTROLpro, Version 10 or 11  Remote controlling (sending data from the remote viewer/controller to the data acquisition PC) is only supported when the data acquisition PC is running CONTROL or CONTROLpro, Version 12.0.  Obviously, you are going to be selective when you are distributing VISIONpro documents with remote control capabilities.  CONTROL and CONTROLpro offer security measures that allow you to control and limit remote access to your data acquisition application.

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