Modular development of an educational remote laboratory platform for electrical engineering : the ELVIS iLab

Abstract

iLabs are remote online laboratories that allow users to perform experiments through the Internet. As an educational tool the iLab platform enables students and educators, who do not have access to laboratories, to complement their theoretical knowledge by carrying out experiments remotely on equipment located anywhere in the world and at any time of the day. Students perform experiments on actual instruments allowing them to get real data, instead of relying on simulations. The iLab project has been deployed in 3 universities in Africa using the National Instruments Educational Laboratory Virtual Instrument Suite platform which is a cheap all-in-one electronics workstation for electronics experiments. This thesis describes an increase in the functionality available on the current version of the ELVIS iLab in order to enable a wider range of experiments to be run on the platform. The functionalities explored include adding two arbitrary waveform generator channels and bode analyzer for frequency domain analysis, which was not possible in the previous designs.