AN INTEGRATED PLATFORM, IMPLEMENTING REAL, REMOTE LAB-EXPERIMENTS FOR ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING COURSES

摘要

Nowadays, the design of a remote, real instrumentation and measurement laboratory requires flexible hardware platforms. This paper describes an Internet-based laboratory, named Remote Monitored and Controlled Laboratory (RMCLab) developed at University of Patras, Greece, for electrical engineering experiments. The key feature of this remote laboratory is the utilization of real experiments, in terms of instrumentation and under-measurement circuits, rather than simulation or virtual reality environment. RMC Lab's hardware infrastructure contains multiple reconfigurable sub-systems (FPGAs), which can be enhanced by almost any analog expansion module. The main characteristics of this system include the versatility of the hardware resources, due to the dynamic reconfiguration potentiality and the low cost of the hardware components. Moreover, this system enables its users to test, in real time, their own custom circuit designs. The paper concludes with a specific example regarding an elementary circuit in digital electronics and a short statistical review of the RMCLab educational usage. RMCLab can be accessed via the web through http://www.apel.ee.upatras.gr/rmclab.