Emona-based interactive amplitude modulation/demodulation iLab

Abstract

The MIT iLab Project has developed online laboratories (iLabs) which are lab stations that can be accessed and controlled remotely over the Internet. With iLabs, students can conduct real experiments on real equipment over the Internet. With the introduction of the National Instrument's Educational Laboratory Virtual Instrument Suite, NI ELVIS, in the development of iLabs, students to gain a better understanding of engineering concepts by obtaining real data from electronic labs. One of such crucial engineering concepts is telecommunications which plays a key role in transmitting information between people, systems and computers. There are many telecommunication schemes which exist today. The iLab developed in this thesis implements an experiment for studying one of such schemes, Amplitude Modulation. The NI ELVIS is used together with a device called the Emona Digital and Analog Telecommunications Experimenter (DATEx) to achieve the Amplitude Modulation lab setup. This iLab is an Interactive iLab, which gives one student at a time complete, real-time control over the lab set up. The Amplitude Modulation iLab will permit students to tune various controls and observe the behavior and changes of relevant signals, both in time domain and frequency domain. It will also permit students to compare different signals and retrieve data locally for post processing.