I was a T.A. in Digital System Modeling and Synthesis course and was helping in the labs. That year we changed a lot of things in the labs (for example we added a CPU lab. see my post here!). We were developing the labs during the summer for the autumn course. One day I asked my colleague: “why don’t we have a remote laboratory here?” he shrugged his shoulders and responded:”do you want to make one?” and it started! We decided about which lab to turn into a remote laboratory work and we went shopping LEGOs.
I was mainly in charge of hardware development (the control boards/sensors/ the LEGO design part). I recall every day someone would pop into my office and ask me how do i feel about being paid to play with LEGOs (It felt great! 😁). Two of my colleagues were in charge of the interface and the VHDL design part. It took us a long long time to fix everything but we managed to make a crude first version that semester. Everyone was very happy about it (the students were super excited… I enjoyed every bit of it).
Here you can see the demo that my dear friend Hannes (who did the interface and all the website related stuff) prepared:
You can find more info about this project here!
We even wrote a paper about it:
- S. P. Azad, H. Kinks, M. A. Tajammul and P. Ellervee, “An ad-hoc implementation of a remote laboratory,” 2015 IEEE International Conference on Microelectronics Systems Education (MSE), Pittsburgh, PA, 2015, pp. 48-51.
doi: 10.1109/MSE.2015.7160015
However, currently no-one is using it. Which in my opinion is a pity!