Design and Implementation of Remote Mechatronics Laboratory for e-Learning Using LabVIEW and Smartphone and Cross-platform Communication Toolkit (SCCT)

This paper reports a work-in progress at the SOLVE, Students Online Laboratory Through Virtual Instrumentation, at the National Institute of Technology, Surathkal, Karnataka on the design and implementation of a remote lab utilizing emerging technologies.The paper focuses on the basic implementation of a remote laboratory using the publisher-subscriber architecture. Control system and Vibration experiments were chosen for practical implementation which could be monitored and controlled by students using internet. This enabled the remote users to gain a better understanding of the concept of vibrations and control system by performing the real experiment at a time and place of their choice. Both publisher and subscriber were developed using LabVIEW and SCCT add-on for communication. SCCT provides high performance data communication on conventional platforms like LabVIEW, Android, HMTL5, Java, JavaScript, thereby making it multiplatform approach. The method followed for data acquisition by the experimental server, architecture followed at the publisher and subscriber end, brief description about the performable experiments is explained in the present paper.