An IEEE1451.0-compliant FPGA-based reconfigurable weblab

Abstract

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 type of laboratories allows both students and teachers to remotely access physical experiments enabling the control of laboratory equipment through a simple device connected to the Internet (e.g. a PC). Besides the provided flexibility (e.g. access to a real laboratory on a 24x7 basis) other advantages may be enumerated, such as the increase on students‟ motivation and the cost reductions for all the involved actors in the teaching and learning process (e.g. students, teachers, institutions, etc.). However, current weblabs‟ architectures and their underlying infrastructures follow specific and distinct technical implementations, i.e. there is no standard solution. Moreover, they are not able to be reconfigured with different instruments and modules, known as weblab modules. Whenever required in a traditional laboratory, these modules can be attached to the target experiments, provided that they are available in the laboratory facilities. Some weblabs‟ implementations allow setting up connections between the target experiments and the weblab modules provided in the infrastructure, but these modules cannot be changed or replicated, i.e. the flexibility for changing the layout and the modules used in a particular weblab infrastructure is very reduced. Therefore, the lack of a standard access and design of weblabs, and the reduced flexibility for changing the required modules for conducting the target experiments, are two issues that are preventing their wide-spread adoption in engineering education. 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 the weblab modules, thus allowing: i) the use of standard Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) to describe the weblab modules, making them easily sharable and replicable and; ii) the weblab infrastructures to inherit the reconfigurable nature of FPGAs, making them flexible in order to accommodate different embedded modules with the inherent reduction of costs that may arise from replacing traditional with embedded instrumentation. Besides contextualizing the role of weblabs in engineering education, presenting some examples and commenting the use of traditional instrumentation standards for their design, the thesis describes the IEEE1451.0 Std., suggesting extensions for its adoption in the design of weblabs. Supported on those suggestions and on FPGA technologies, it specifies the development of an IEEE1451.0-compliant reconfigurable weblab prototype and presents and analyses researchers‟ opinions about its use and the benefits for engineering education.