Work in progress - using Internet applications to control remote devices for an instrumentation laboratory

Abstract

Undergraduate engineering students have undertaken a research project on the creation and the development of an Internet based real-time access to laboratory devices. SelfLab@Home is a novel tele-education project of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Calgary. Its original objective was to become a self-paced remotely accessed training for the use of four basic laboratory devices: oscilloscope, waveform generator, DMM (digital multimeter) and a power supply. The high-level design components include a client interface, a client/server interface, a main server, a server/hardware interface, the agilent oscilloscope, and a video streaming scheme. The implementation of this project required the following components: client Web browser interface, Web server, application server, hardware dynamic link library (DLL), and video streaming scheme. A joint team of high school students enrolled in the research enrichment program and fourth year students have built this remotely accessed instrumentation laboratory to give all undergraduate students a chance to learn how to operate the equipment from outside the lab while working at their own pace.