Design and implementation of experiments with real-time shared architecture using different mobile systems

Abstract

This work presents a new design for an internet laboratory at University of Baghdad (UoB-iLab) that can be used by students off-campus to execute real time experiments in the on-campus. The UoB-iLab architecture is designed to be used with limited internet bandwidth and concurrent access by users and administrators. The Arduino ® Microcontroller was used to establish the interface platform with various laboratory devices using C and C++ programming languages to control input/output signals for a specific lab device. The web interface for the system was developed using HTML, PHP, and AJAX along with JAVA to build graphical real-time interfaces for the experiments that can work on any operating system platform (Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Unix, BeOS) on PCs and mobile devices. Several experiments were designed to check the reliability of the suggested UoB-iLab architecture to deal with different types of input and output configurations during the real experiments session while using several types of sensors and actuators. The suggested design of UoB-iLab can be used to implement several types of real-time experiments to improve the practical skills for engineering college students at the University of Baghdad and other universities without the need for high resource investment.