Ricardo Jorge Nunes Costa

Web-based course management and delivery software is becoming common in many areas of education, but the facilities provided by such systems do not support practical laboratory work. In many technical areas this limitation constitutes a serious restriction on the usefulness of any web-based educational frameworks, since “pen-and-paper” courseware is but a small part of the overall pedagogic materials that must be provided to the students. The system described in this paper addresses this need in the area of digital electronics and is ...

Aiming for teaching/learning support in sciences and engineering areas, the Remote Experimentation concept (an E-learning subset) has grown in last years with the development of several infrastructures that enable doing practical experiments from anywhere and anytime, using a simple PC connected to the Internet. Nevertheless, given its valuable contribution to the teaching/learning process, the development of more infrastructures should continue, in order to make available more solutions able to improve courseware contents and motivate students for learning. The work presented in this paper contributes for that purpose, in the specific area of industrial automation. After a brief introduction to the Remote Experimentation concept, we describe a remote accessible lab infrastructure that enables users to conduct real experiments with an important and widely used transducer in industrial automation, named Linear Variable Differential Transformer.

Commonly, when a weblab is developed to support remote experiments in sciences and engineering courses, a particular hardware/software architecture is implemented. However, the existence of several technological solutions to implement those architectures difficults the emergence of a standard, both at hardware and software levels. While particular solutions are adopted assuming that only qualified people may implement a weblab, the control of the physical space and the power consumption are often forgotten. Since controlling these two previous aspects may increase the quality of the weblab hosting the remote experiments, this paper proposes the useof a new layer implemented by a domotic system bus with several devices (e.g. lights, power sockets, temperature sensors, and others) able to be controlled through the Internet. We also provide a brief proof-of-concept in the form of a weblab equipped with a simple domotic system usually implemented in smart houses. The added value to the ...

Abstract—Adopting standard-based weblab infrastructures can be an added value for spreading their influence and acceptance in education. This paper suggests a solution based on the IEEE1451.0 Std. and FPGA technology for creating reconfigurable weblab infrastructures using In-struments and Modules (I&Ms) described through standard Hardware Description Language (HDL) files. It describes a methodology for creating and binding I&Ms into an IEEE1451-module embedded in a FPGA-based board able to be remotely controlled/accessed using IEEE1451-HTTP commands. At the end, an example of a step-motor control-ler module bond to that IEEE1451-module is described.

The expansion of the Internet has supported the development of online teaching resources based on this communication media (e-learning). However, the possibility to run experiments on remoteaccessible Labs, in a teaching context, is a more recent fact. This paper describes the framework for delivering through the Web, a course on Design for Debug and Test that contains several practical exercises involving the use of the IEEE 1149.1 and 1149.4 test infrastructures. The exercises are done in a remote-accessible Lab, installed at our facilities, through a simple interface readable on any web browser. By using a complete Java-based solution, there is no need for installing any sort of plug-ins at the client computer as it happens in other similar approaches that require some sort of downloading extra software or the development of Common Gateway Interfaces (CGIs).

Technology evolution is contributing for a sustainable change in engineering education. New resources and tools are continuously improving the teaching and learning processes, providing more pathways to both students and teachers for accessing better educational contents. In engineering courses, the experimental work, typically supported by traditional laboratories, is also encompassing technology evolution as denoted by the appearance of the so-called weblabs or remote laboratories. This thesis describes a research work conducted to design standard based reconfigurable weblabs. It analyses the possibility of using the IEEE1451.0 Std. to design the weblabs and the modules adopted by the underlying infrastructures to control/monitor the target experiments. Additionally, to provide reconfiguration capability to the weblab infrastructure, it considers the use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) for accommodating those weblab modules.

Abstract: Concepts like E-learning and M-learning are changing the traditional learning place. No longer restricted to well-defined physical places, education on Automation and other Engineering areas is entering the so-called ubiquitous learning place, where even the more practical knowledge (acquired at lab classes) is now moving into, due to emergent concepts such as Remote Experimentation or Mobile Experimentation. While Remote Experimentation is traditionally regarded as the remote access to real-world experiments ...

Abstract—Adopting standard-based weblab infrastructures can be an added value for spreading their influence and acceptance in education. This paper suggests a solution based on the IEEE1451. 0 Std. and FPGA technology for creating reconfigurable weblab infrastructures using Instruments and Modules (I&Ms) described through standard Hardware Description Language (HDL) files. It describes a methodology for creating and binding I&Ms into an IEEE1451-module embedded in a FPGA-based board able to be remotely ...

Abstract-Weblabs are spreading their influence in Science and Engineering (S&E) courses providing a way to remotely conduct real experiments. Typically, they are implemented by different architectures and infrastructures supported by Instruments and Modules (I&Ms) able to be remotely controlled and observed. Besides the inexistence of a standard solution for implementing weblabs, their reconfiguration is limited to a setup procedure that enables interconnecting a set of preselected I&Ms into an Experiment Under Test (EUT). Moreover, ...