iLab - 1st year Electronics
Students in first year electronics laboratories have limited time to complete their experiments during scheduled lab classes without any opportunities for out-of-hours use of equipment.
- Principal Investigator - Neil Bergmann (PI) with Peter Allen, and Øyvind Hansen
- Start date - September 2005
- Goal - To provide access, via the web, to first year electronics experiments to supplement (not replace) scheduled lab classes.
- Overview of project - A key component of kinaesthetic learning in electrical circuit theory is the construction of practical electric circuits, stimulation of those circuits with a range of DC and AC voltages and currents, and measurement of the response of the circuits to these stimuli. The circuit response is compared to theoretical circuit-theory calculations, and students are able to understand the strengths and limitations of theoretical circuit calculations compared to practical circuit measurements. In addition, students become familiar with laboratory techniques in general, and in particular with the standard suite of electrical measurement equipment (power supplies, multimeters, function generators, oscilloscopes). Practically, student time in on-campus laboratories is limited by scheduling constraints, and staff cost of demonstrators and laboratory supervisors. In the case of UQ-ITEE first year electrical engineers, students have 10 scheduled sessions of 2 hours each. This project aims to augment (not replace) this laboratory experience by making the same laboratory experiments remotely available to students anytime, anywhere from a simple but powerful web interface. Importantly, the remote experiments are not simulations of the laboratory environment, but rather use the same sorts of instruments which are controlling and measuring the same sorts of components as the original experiments. A major innovation of this work is to allow students to construct their own circuits remotely using an instrument called a computer-controlled multiplexer. This device consists of a large number of computer-controlled switches which can be used to connect together signal sources, electrical components and measuring instruments in arbitrary configurations. As well as correct circuits, students are able to build incorrect or inconsistent circuits and will get the same faulty results as they would in the actual laboratory. Work is currently in progress to build the first version of the software based on the MIT iLab framework, which combines the MIT service broker with web-based clients that allow students to construct circuit templates, submit the experiments for execution, track the progress of their submitted experiments and view the results. The service broker also communicates with a laboratory server which translates user commands into appropriate Labview commands to the computer controlled voltage sources, meters, oscilloscopes and circuit multiplexers. It is hoped to deploy a first prototype of the system in early 2007 for use by students.
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