Remote laboratory experiments in electrical engineering education

Abstract

A remote or online laboratory is a laboratory where one can access experiments and instruments or other equipment from outside over the Internet. Laboratories for undergraduate education or vocational training in basic electrical engineering are easy to control remotely. One cannot see or hear the electrical current, so there is no need for sound or video transmission. Computer-based instruments do not have any control buttons or displays on the front panel. They have virtual front panels on the host computer only and those panels can be moved to a remote computer screen. However, the manual forming of circuits and connecting of test probes cannot be transferred. These actions must be performed in another way in a remote laboratory. Remotely controllable switch matrices must be used. In the remote laboratory at BTH (Blekinge Institute of Technology) a client/server architecture is used. The student makes all the settings wanted on the client computer and then sends them to a lab server. The server makes measurements requested and returns the data obtained. The whole procedure takes only a second or two. A number of clients can access the experiments simultaneously. The laboratory is used in ordinary courses for on-campus students. They access the laboratory from a computer hall or from elsewhere outside the university. Due to the low number of bytes transferred, a 56 kbit modem is sufficient.