Online Access and Control of Laboratory Stations using Video Conference Systems

Abstract

This Innovative Practice full paper presents the use of video conference systems to access online laboratory stations. Online laboratories are a solution for institutions that offer online or blended educational programs and want to offer hands-on training to their students, and for institutions that do not have the infrastructure to set up some specific experiments. They are defined as an alternative to provide remote access through internet connection to real equipment or virtual experiments located in another place. The use of online laboratories can reduce costs in terms of space, equipment, maintenance, personnel, among others. Most of the laboratory stations available in laboratory rooms in educational institutions include some type of software installed in a computer that allows the students to setup, configure, and program the laboratory equipment for their experiments. These software systems can be proprietary systems provided by the manufacturer of the laboratory equipment, and also can be systems provided by third party companies. This paper presents an alternative method of accessing and controlling laboratory stations using functionalities available in video communication platforms such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams, that offer options for remote controlling of a computer and can receive feedback from the shared screen feature. In this scheme, an external controller is attached to the laboratory equipment to provide bidirectional commands interchange between the user computer and the laboratory station. As part of the outcome of this work, a functional prototype of an online laboratory was made applying an alternative scheme that uses the communication system Zoom API. This prototype enables a Zoom session between the user and the local laboratory machine to interact with the first party software installed in the machine.