Design of an Electronic Instrumentation Virtual Laboratory based on Free-Open

Resources

Gustavo Meneses Ing. Eléctrico UNALMED

Esp. Automatización Industrial UdeAMsc. en Ingeniería UdeA

Universidad de San Buenaventura

Motivations

Over the last decade a complete plethora of free-open hardware and software resources have been developed for use in engineering and other fields [4], more recently significant advances have been achieved in the field of microcontrollers [5] and data acquisition and analysis [6]

Motivations

Virtual laboratories have become an extended tool used for teachers and students around the world in all stages of education, ranging from elementary school to higher education[1]. The virtualization of laboratory practicals has shown to be an effective mean to extend learning scenarios beyond the classroom or laboratory at campus site.

THREE WIDELY KNOWN FREE-OPEN RESOURCES THAT CAN GET INTEGRATED INTO A VIRTUAL LABORATORY

Requirements and functional arrangement for electronic instrumentation virtual laboratory

Project's Goal

The main goal is to design and implement a set of practicals belonging to the Electronic Instrumentation course for the Electronic Engineering undergraduate program.

Laboratory practicals on temperature sensing, error estimation, data acquisition, remote monitoring and sound analysis have been designed to be integrated to course virtual activities

MAIN HARDWARE-SOFTWARE COMPONENTS FOR THE OPEN SOURCE WEB-BASED PROPOSED VIRTUAL LAB FRAMEWORK

Self-made USB Pinguino board to support the virtual laboratory circuit and hardware setup for the practicals

Hardware and circuit setup for the implementation of a practical on temperature sensing and data acquisition

Integration scheme for the hardware and software components of the electronic instrumentation virtual laboratory

General overview of the Virtual Laboratory operating scenario

Conclusions

Current free-open tools exhibits acceptable performance and offer to users and administrators enough options to design and put into operation, implementations covering the essential needs for virtual practicals.

Conclusions

Virtual laboratories and similar e-learning tools improve and complement traditional “at-classroom” education instead of abolishing it.

Conclusions

The solution based in open-free resources has flexible features that enhance time sustainability. The less dependent design on hardware-software elements, allows a wider spectrum of operating variants, including the adoption of teaching approaches or models dynamically, as time passes according to academic results.

References

[1] M. Cabrera, R. Bragós, M. Pérez, J. Mariño, J. Rius, O. Gomis, M. Casany and X. Gironella, “GILABVIR: Virtual Laboratories and Remote Laboratories in Engineering,”in Proc. Of IEEE EDUCON 2010-The Future of Global Learning in Engineering Education, Madrid, 2010, pp. 1403-1408

[4] J. Rodríguez, P. Russo and A. Sulé, “A Virtual Exhibition of Open Source Software for Libraries,” presented at the 16th BOBCATSSS Symposium, Zadar (Croatia), Jan. 28-30, 2008

[5] M. Smolnikar and M. Mohoric, “A Framework for Developing a Microhip PIC Microcontroller Based Applications,” WSEAS Trans. Advances in Engineering Education, vol 5, Issue 2, pp.83-91, Feb. 2008.

[6] Z. Peng and L. Ma, “The Realization of SCADA based on Scilab,” In Proc. Of the International Workshop on Open Source Software SCILAB and its Engineering Applications OSSS-EA, Hangzhou, China, 2006, pp. 175-185

[7] G. Meneses, M. Correa, B. Mendoza and Y. Ocampo, “Laboratorio virtual para la enseñanza de instrumentación electrónica,” Revista Ingenierías Usbmed, vol 1, Issue 1, pp. 70-77, Dec. 2010.