A LabVIEW and CompactRIO data acquisition system built to measure the performance of a novel solar energy collection device — a Solar Thermal Electric Panel (STEP) — and compare it against commercially available systems. The results were published on ResearchGate. This project combined instrumentation design, high-accuracy sensor calibration, and data analysis to answer a real research question: does this new panel design actually outperform existing technology, and by how much? The answer required building the measurement system from scratch because no off-the-shelf solution could capture what the researchers needed.