Design of a Low Cost Switching Board Enabling a Reconfigurable Remote Experiment

Abstract

Most of currently remote laboratories implementations include interactive experimentation. In this case, students use real devices and equipment to perform real experiments, which need some flexibility of interaction with the hardware platform. The hardware platform is composed of a Raspberry Pi as a lab server, a switching board (SB), a practical work circuit board and some measurement instruments. The SB is used to make configuration of experimentation by establishing connection between the practical work circuit and measurement instruments. During the experimentation process, students change the setup using a web page. In the background, the hardware configuration is realized using SB, which is controlled by the lab server. The purpose of this work is to develop a new SB in order to provide more possibilities, interaction flexibility with the hardware platform, ease of use, improve performance in response time and finally reduce the cost of the hardware. The SB is based on switches instead of relays. This board can be plugged directly on a Raspberry Pi to facilitate the assembly. It extends the “SPI” bus in order to control some electronic components such as digital potentiometers. Its use is illustrated with a circuit with multiple combinations.