Real-Time Execution of UOB-iLabs Shared Architectures

Abstract

Laboratories availability is one of the key factor for the success of any academic program in the universities .Due to large number of students and the limitation in space, resource and time for using the laboratories in the universities a new style of laboratories had been developed that allows students to conduct real experiments remotely through internet environment (iLab).In this work we suggest a new design for internet laboratory that can be used by the student at mechatronics engineering department at the University of Baghdad. This internet laboratory can be used with limited internet bandwidth and several concurrent accesses of users and administrators. The suggested design for University of Baghdad internet laboratory (UOB-iLab) depends on the Arduino Microcontroller to establish the interface with various laboratory devices using C and C++ program language to control input/output signals for a specific lab device.The Web interface for UOB-iLab has been developed using HTML, PHP and AJAX in addition to JAVA language to build graphical real time interfaces for the experiment. Several experiments were designed to the check the reliability of the suggested UOB-iLab architectures. Different types of  input- output configurations were tested  like ( Controlling a DC motor using Arduino, Python and PHP ).The suggested design of UOB-iLab Weblab server shows good reliability for remotely operated laboratory experiments through web environment in comparison with other available platforms. Also, the Arduino Microcontroller can be easily used as a controlling platform for iLab since it is compatible with different types of sensors and actuators. The designed web interface using HTML-JAVA- PHP-JavaScript code is used successfully to be interfaced with Arduino Microcontroller, and Processing Language was very helpful in building Applet Platform directly. The suggested design of UOB-iLab can be used to design several types of experiments to improve the lab skill of mechatronics engineering department at University Of Baghdad and other Universities.

Keywords: internet laboratory, remote control, weblab