Remote EE laboratory environment

Abstract

The University of Washington Bothell has a large, diverse and non-traditional student population who must balance jobs, family, and school. The campus is located at the confluence of two major highways with most engineering classes scheduled in the late afternoon or evenings to better accommodate the needs of these students. Unfortunately, traffic in the Seattle metropolitan area around evening rush hour is quite congested and these students lose valuable time getting to campus for classes and labs. This paper describes design and development work carried out by our students to enable their peers to do EE lab experiments working from home by remotely accessing the experiments. The remote lab is an integrated hardware platform consisting of a motherboard with a PC-based oscilloscope, variable power supply, logic analyzer, and function generator. A series of traditional EE lab experiments plug into the motherboard. Remote users access the experiments through a remote desktop connection to a lab PC that provides the communications link to the motherboard. Each experimental daughter board consists of all of the basic circuitry as well as additional circuitry enabling circuit parameters to be changed, parts to be swapped out, and wiring errors to be introduced into the experiment. It is our intent to expand this program by establishing an open-source consortium. Anyone may modify and improve the system, contribute new experiments to the pool, and make the improvements available to the educational community.