Abstract: According to the requirement of ship design and teach!ng experiment, a real time monitoring system of ship power station based on Visual C+ + 6.0 and multimedia and DB technology was designed. Both industrial control computer and single chip were used as two control parts, and the real time communication between them was realized by Modbus ASCII protocol while on-line monitoring of the diesel engine groups of the ship power station was achieved. A specific practicing structure of the monitoring system was presented, and the key points of the monitoring program were discussed in detail. The system has advantages of a friendly interface between users and computer, complete functions and great visual effects.