Laboratory Activity during COVID- 19 as a “Virtual Experience”: Restriction or Chance?

Abstract

COVID-19's widespread has infected about 3 million world population, and the countries have enforced a complete lock down that has created a severe economic and health crisis. In presence of this pandemic, the educational activity, tutorial courses and laboratory saw a drastic change. In this context, important modifications have been imposed mainly related to the structure, the way of operating, and the operational phase which involve students and teachers. Even more difficult is the implementation of laboratory and experimental activities through remote labs. In this paper we address this latter point, a possible implementation of a remote laboratory through the adoption of a software platform to connect students to the real lab will be presented. The use and the interconnection of TeamViewer software, LabVIEW, MA TLAB and Arduino, will allow the students, at home, to carry out remote routines, program for conditioning circuit and see remotely the effect of the “virtual” lab implemented at distance. The hardware part is installed in the “real” research laboratory at the university and they can remotely perform measurements, characterizations and test validating the theory through experiments. This approach can be implemented with various experiments, here we will show a study of a DC motor with an analysis of vibrations and transient by using MATLAB for dynamic simulations. LabVIEW for the characterization, Arduino for the acquisition/ driving, and Team Viewer software has been used to virtually connect the students to the real lab.