Remote circuit design labs with analog discovery

Abstract

The limited resources in the traditional labs have restricted the effective and innovative circuit design projects from freshmen Circuits 1 class to Capstone ideas. The limited number of measuring and signal-generating instruments makes it difficult for students to engage in these projects when they need to share these instruments or schedule to use them at a specific time. Furthermore, it is a challenge for students to learn how to use various instruments including power supplies, multi-meters, oscilloscopes, and function-generators if not used in conjunction with each other. Likewise, it is also highly unlikely that students will acquire all of this rather expensive equipment and design a lab environment at their residence. Under such constraints, students cannot gain the necessary hands-on experience. Moreover, students have a tendency to play a minimal role in group-Assigned projects, leading to minimal outcomes, which further weaken their accountability and curiosity. This will seriously reduce the students' aptitude for circuit designs and weaken a vast majority of other necessary engineering and technology based skills. A new approach, in which each student owns a circuit design station, is possible with a new compact device, which has incorporated many of these devices into one unit. Students can conduct many circuit designs spontaneously using their own remote lab. They can assemble and test various analog, digital, or mixed signal circuits including those from classroom textbooks. This paper will show that students can now set up a convenient remote laboratory to design and test low-power circuits. This lab environment is the newly launched Analog Discovery from Digilent. Analog Discovery is a low cost and portable test and measurement device, which provides various instruments including two oscilloscope probes, two arbitrary waveform generator, two power supplies, a voltmeter, a logic analyzer, and a pattern generator in a single module. This unit communicates with the WaveForms software and receives power from a standard USB port. This paper will introduce the course outline and present a very simple lab assignment, which students would typically test during the first few days of an introductory class. This example demonstrates the flexibility and ease-of-use while designing or testing a circuit with the Analog Discovery from any remote location. ©American Society for Engineering education, 2013.