Elsevier

Measurement

Volume 45, Issue 4, May 2012, Pages 795-807
Measurement

Hardware and software platform for ADCWAN remote laboratory

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.measurement.2011.12.003Get rights and content

Abstract

In this paper an innovative hardware and software platform, called ADCWAN (Analog to Digital Converters on Wide Area Network), concerning the electronic measurement field is presented. In particular, ADCWAN is a pioneering networking cooperative environment regarding Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) testing. The hardware and software architectures of ADCWAN are described in detail and some ADC tests using the same test setup are presented. ADCWAN is distributed on a wide geographic area providing theoretical and practical tools to characterize ADCs. In particular, ADCWAN is a new approach to promote the harmonization of standards existing for ADCs, it establishes a collaborative work environment supporting the scientific research community to improve the harmonization level, allowing the scientific training of young researchers, the dissemination and the comparison of metrological information. In the paper the goals and benefits of ADCWAN toward research community are summarized.

Highlights

► A platform for research collaboration in the field of ADC testing is presented. ► It is integrated in an open-source learning management system. ► It supports remote experiments on actual instrumentation.

Introduction

The concept of remote access to laboratory equipment arises naturally from telemetry and the well-established trend of using computers, usually PCs, to control and record data from local laboratory apparatus. As scientific research by using instrumentation and experimentation has become more expensive and remote education has become more common, Internet-accessible laboratories no longer appear novel [1], [2]. Remote laboratories (RLs) used for the distance learning on instrumentation and measurement have been focus of increasing attention in recent years.

The main applications of RLs refer to the industrial and educational fields. In the industrial field they are suitable if the environment to be controlled is not accessible to human operators or if it is spread over a wide area [3]. In the educational field, RLs allow expanding the possibilities of traditional laboratories. In fact, traditional laboratories suffer of expensive equipment, the necessity to repeat the same experiment many times, and the insufficient number of qualified teaching personnel [4]. Instead, RLs allow sharing equipments among different departments or universities [5] and provide to the students an access to the experiments not limited to the course time schedule [3].

Nowadays, a lot of remote experiments, lessons and seminars are available on the Web [6], [7], [8]. On the other hand, RLs, able to interactively manage remotely controlled experiments, have diffused more slowly than the common e-learning courses. However, in last years, new technologies have been introduced which foster the creation of interactive RLs [9], [10].

Projects for sharing real laboratories on the Internet have been realized and validated in different contexts. As an example, in the field of biochemistry, access to an electron microscope, provided to remote users, offers them control over the only instrument features that they need to undertake their tasks. Therefore, damages to equipment are avoided and the user safety is assured [11].

Most of these efforts, however, have been realized for ad hoc systems that are closely tailored to the educational environment. From the point of view of learning institutions, RLs solve some problems related to expensive instrumentation, limited spaces and number of teachers not enough in comparison to students, often numerous in huge Universities. Moreover, from student point of view, RLs provide more flexibility for the learner in choosing time and place to study.

As in learning environment, a RL provides several benefits to the scientific community, too. As an example, it allows sharing scientific skills and expensive instruments located on disparate geographic areas, comparing experimental results quickly. Indeed, scientific research groups located on different geographic areas can work to different tasks of the same project using the same instruments and workstations with identical physical conditions, by means of a collaborative work environment.

In this paper the Analog to Digital Converters on Wide Area Network (ADCWAN), an innovative Web platform devoted to ADCs testing, is introduced. It has been developed by international efforts of some European Universities to (i) provide a shared and realistic working environment for the international scientific research, and (ii) allow the researchers training, the skills dissemination and the experimental evaluation concerning ADCs.

The paper is organized as it follows. In Section 2, an overview on various projects of RLs is presented, by highlighting their capability to support a collaborative work environment, as well as to allow geographically distributed experiments. In Section 3, the ADCWAN’s aims are discussed. In Section 4, the ADCWAN’s architecture is described. Finally, in Section 5, the theoretical contents of ADCWAN website are illustrated. Moreover, some ADC tests working with the same test setup are presented.

Section snippets

State of art of remote laboratories

As already mentioned, this paper will focus on experiments which involve different locations for the user and experiment and in particular on Remote “hands-on” Laboratories or briefly, RLs. An open issue related to RLs is associated with the specific semantics of the term. Definitions provided in the literature are confusing, and very often, different terms are used to define the same concept, i.e., e-labs, web-labs, virtual-labs, online-labs, distributed learning labs, and so on. In order to

Adcwan’s aims

The ADC characteristics have a dominant impact on the performance of digital measurement instrumentation. ADCs translate the analog quantities, typical of most of the phenomena in the “real world”, into the digital quantities used in information processing, computing, data transmission, and control systems [29].

According to technical standards and manufacturer data sheets the ADC performance is considered as mainly described by static and dynamic parameters. Although specific test procedures

Overall architecture

ADCWAN’s architecture, as highlighted in the previous section, uses Moodle as LMS (Fig. 2). The LMS is executed on a central server of the distributed laboratory, called Laboratory Portal. The LMS interfaces to the users through a Web Server that is hosted on the same machine. ADCWAN has a client–server architecture, in which the users takes the measurement equipment control by means of RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol), in order to access to the desktop of the MS connected to the instrumentation,

ADCWAN contents

Users can access to ADCWAN website at http://lesim1.ing.unisannio.it/adcwan/, where some helpful contents and ADC tests are reported. The ADCWAN Website structure is shown in Fig. 5.

The contents are organized and described as shown in the following Sub-sections.

Conclusions

In this paper, a cooperative work environment called ADCWAN, distributed over a wide geographic area and devoted to scientific research teams working on ADCs testing has been presented. ADCWAN is a new approach to promote the harmonization of standards existing for ADCs, helping the scientific community and allowing the scientific training of young researchers, the dissemination and the comparison of metrological information. It provides theoretical and practical tools to characterize ADCs by

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Prof. P.Daponte for his interesting and useful suggestions. This work was supported in part by Italian Ministry of University and Research under the Program for the development of international cooperation (INTERLINK-II04C01E5H).

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