With the development of remote experiments, online teaching, and Internet-of-Things technologies, providing Web-based access to local simulation models or experimental devices has become an important direction for experimental platform development1,2,3,4. Recent work has further integrated Internet-of-Things-equipped laboratories with project-based learning and local or remote access, demonstrating the continued development of flexible and networked experimental platforms in engineering education5. For control system experiments, users usually need to adjust input parameters in a browser and observe output states in real time6,7. Conventional methods typically require a separate Web page, control-binding logic, and data communication interface for each experimental object8,9. When the variables in the back-end model change, the front-end page often must be modified accordingly, which creates substantial repeated development work and limits rapid expansion of the experimental platform.
Remote interoperability protocol (RIP) provides a middleware layer between back-end experimental models and Web front ends10,11. In the RIP-based automatic UI-generation approach described in previous work, the RIP Server provides metadata for each experiment, including variable names, input/output attributes, data types, minimum values, maximum values, precision, descriptions, and the available read/write methods11. A Web client can then use this metadata to create the corresponding HTML elements, such as labels, numeric input fields, sliders, Boolean controls, and output displays, during page loading or refresh11. The present protocol does not reimplement or redefine the RIP specification. Instead, it uses the existing open-source RIP service and RIP-based metadata-to-HTML UI-generation logic as the foundation for communication and interface generation, and focuses on the reproducible construction, registration, proxy deployment, and verification of two LabVIEW VI examples.
Compared with conventional custom Web interface development, RIP-based automatic UI generation reduces the need to implement control layouts, variable-binding logic, and basic communication functions when multiple LabVIEW experiments expose comparable scalar input and output variables8,9,10,11. After a new VI is registered and its variables are available to the RIP Server, the same metadata-reading and control-generation logic can be reused to construct the basic Web interface10,11. This feature is useful for rapid deployment, teaching demonstrations, and remote-laboratory platforms that require consistent access to several similar experiments3,8,9. However, the automatically generated interface also has limitations. It does not fully infer the physical relationships among variables, automatically determine chart mappings, or design domain-specific visualization and safety interactions11. Therefore, manual Web interface development remains preferable when an experiment requires highly customized graphics, complex user workflows, advanced visualization, hardware safety interlocks, or multiuser write arbitration.
The overall workflow of the protocol is summarized in Figure 1. In this workflow, a LabVIEW VI first defines the required input controls and output indicators on the Front Panel. The VI is then registered in RIP Server Configuration by specifying the experiment name and the VI path. After registration, the RIP Server reads the metadata of the selected experiment and provides read/write access to the available variables. The XHTML Web page uses the returned metadata to generate the corresponding input controls and output displays automatically, while Caddy provides a unified access path for the static Web page and RIP communication routes. The fan and direct current motor models are used in this study as two implementations of the same workflow. For other LabVIEW experiments that provide compatible scalar, numeric, and Boolean variables, developers can follow the same build-register-deploy-verify workflow to create an automatically generated Web interface, while adding experiment-specific visualization, safety logic, or complex data handling when required.
This article does not propose a new RIP architecture or extend the range of data types already supported by RIP. Instead, it uses RIP as the established communication and metadata-based UI-generation mechanism and focuses on validating the same process with two different LabVIEW systems while documenting a reproducible implementation protocol. Previous work has presented a basic method for automatic Web UI generation based on RIP metadata and has used an online servo motor experiment as a case study11. Web-enabled remote-laboratory architectures combining interactive interfaces with engineering software and LabVIEW have also been reported in earlier studies9,12. However, during practical reproduction, some LabVIEW models in the original case were affected by software version and module compatibility, making them difficult to use directly in a newer environment. The present work, therefore, reconstructs two compatible back-end VIs—a fan model and a direct current (DC) motor proportional-integral-derivative (PID) position-control model—and applies the same metadata-driven UI-generation process to both. The contribution is the cross-system validation of the established RIP workflow and a detailed protocol for reproducing the process, rather than an extension of RIP generality.
The intended users of this protocol are researchers, instructors, and laboratory developers who already use LabVIEW VIs and need to expose simulation models or low-risk experimental systems through a Web browser without independently implementing a complete custom front end for each model. The protocol is particularly suitable for experiments that use standard numeric and Boolean variables, parameter adjustment, and real-time state monitoring10,11. It is less suitable as a standalone solution for experiments that require complex data structures, specialized visualization, strict hardware safety interlocks, or multiuser write arbitration11. The goal of this work is to validate RIP-based automatic Web UI generation with two different LabVIEW systems and to provide a complete, reproducible protocol from back-end VI construction to browser-based interaction. The protocol includes input and output variable definition, RIP Server experiment registration, metadata-based UI generation, Caddy proxy deployment, and remote read/write verification. Applying the same workflow to the fan and DC motor models demonstrates that the established process can be reproduced without manually rewriting a complete Web front end for each example9,10,11.