One size fits all! Multidisciplinary Engineering Platform for On-Campus and Remote Labs.

Ingo Knoblich and Philipp Krauss

Balancing constantly changing curriculums and budget constrains on one hand and increasing technology complexity and limitation of lab time on the other hand is a challenge most educators face on a daily basis.

The laboratory platform NI ELVIS from National Instruments combines the hands-on experience know from traditional instruments with the benefits of a modern pc-based virtual instrumentation platform . Students can “touch” real components when building a circuit, manually set parameters for the function generator with knobs and dials and place probes of the oscilloscope at different points in the circuit. Limitations of the traditional box instrument approach can be overcome by driving the teaching platform from the PC. A frequency sweep can be parameterized by using the mouse, advanced analysis can be applied to the measured data when necessary and custom displays or new measurement routines will be created from scratch in order to adapt the system to current requirements.

Rapid Prototyping Modules for Remote Engineering Applications

Karsten Henke, Heinz-Dietrich Wuttke and Tobias Braune

This contribuion describes the concept and implementation of an integration process for microcontroller and FPGA based Rapid Prototyping Modules into a remote lab system. This implementation enables a Web-based access to hardware models.

A student uploads a source file implementation to the remote lab server in order to test an implementation directly within an hardware environment. The remote lab server offers the interfaces to integrate specific project and hardware plug-ins. These plug-ins access a hardware specific software environment to automatically compile and program the resulting firmware. To stimulate this design, the remote lab server exchanges digital signals via a serial interface.

To allow the student to compare architectures of various controllers using the same hardware model, a specific controller using the remote lab interface can be selected.For this, a multiplexer provides the control connection between the respective controller and the hardware model.

Virtual Environment for Designing Real Embedded Applications

Nicusor Birsan

Computer-based embedded systems have been designed for many decades in a variety of industrial domains, but their economic importance has grown exponentially recently as electronic components have made their way into everyday-use devices. The productivity cannot be substantially improved without new methods and tools.

In this context virtual instrumentation could have an essential role helping designing of such heterogeneous systems from requirements and modeling to final qualification tests. The graphical system design can modify the entire development cycle, reshaping it from “V” to a “Y” life-cycle through automated code generation, and further, as articulation point into a platform based design paradigm, to a “T” one. At the same time, the environment has effects in teaching the multidisciplinary domain of embedded systems by giving the opportunity to switch from lecture-experimentation to a laboratory-lecture order into a hands-on approach.