An educational remote laboratory for controlling a signal conditioning circuit with an LDR sensor

Abstract

In the past few years, the technologic evolution of communication and information systems had a major impact in our lives. In education, this evolution broke some geographical barriers, facilitating students' access to real laboratories using a simple device connected to the Internet, contributing therefore to improve teaching and learning methods. To support this evolution, this paper describes a remote laboratory that provides students' access to a typical electronic instrumentation system. Through a set of webpages, users can remotely control a light intensity sensed through a Light Dependent Resistor (LDR) sensor connected in an arm of a configurable Wheatstone Bridge (WB), whose output differential voltage are amplified / attenuated by an Instrumentation Amplifier (IA) circuit. Through this laboratory, users are able to control several components of a typical instrumentation system, visualize changes and analyze some measurements, in the same way as they would do in a traditional hands-on laboratory. An overview of the developed remote laboratory and a contextualization within other available solutions are presented in this paper. At the end, some considerations for its adoption in education are described.