Introduction of digital experimentation capabilities on the ELVIS iLab platform

Abstract

iLabs are online laboratories that give students access to experimental setups enabling them to conduct real experiments remotely through the internet. This circumvents a subset of the typical problems of conventional laboratories in addition to significantly increasing equipment utilization rates. In response to the lack of financial resources at partner universities in Africa, the National Instruments Educational Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Suite (ELVIS), a low cost all-in-one electronics workbench, has become the hardware of choice for the iLab-Africa project. In this thesis, I extended the ELVIS iLab platform to support experiments in Digital Electronics complementing its analog capabilities. The new platform now offers an even greater return on investment by providing pedagogically useful laboratory exercises covering a larger portion of Electrical Engineering curricula.