TechNews digests: Jan - Mar 2010

TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month

Overview of modern teaching equipment that supports distant learning

Laboratory is a key element of engineering and applied sciences educational systems. With the development of Internet and connecting IT technologies, the appearance of remote laboratories was inevitable. Virtual laboratories are also available; they place the experiment in a simulated environment. However, this writing focuses on remote experiments not virtual ones. From the students’ point of view, it is a great help not only for those enrolling in distant or online courses but also for those studying in a more traditional way. With the spread of smart, portable devices capable of connection to the internet, students can expand or restructure time spent on studying. This is a huge help to them and also allows them to individually divide their time up, to learn how to self-study. This independent approach can prepare them for working environments. It offers flexibility and convenience to the students. From the universities’ point of view, it helps reduce maintenance costs and universities can share experiments which also helps the not so well-resourced educational facilities

Minimalist Architecture to Generate Embedded System Web User Interfaces

Part 9: Embedded Systems and Petri NetsInternational audienceThis paper presents a new architecture to semi-automatically generate Web user interfaces for Embedded Systems designed using IOPT Petri Net models. The user interfaces can be used to remotely control, monitor and debug embedded systems using a standard Web Browser. The proposed architecture takes advantage of the distributed nature of the Internet to store all static user interface data and software on third-party Web services (the Cloud), and execute the user-interface code on the user’s Web Browser. A simplified protocol is proposed to enable remote control, status-monitoring, debugging and step-by-step execution, minimizing resource consumption on the physical embedded devices, including processing load, memory and communication bandwidth. As the user interface data and code are kept on third-party Web services, these resources can be shared among multiple embedded device units, and the hardware requirements to implement the devices can be simplified, leading to reduced cost solutions. To prevent down-time due to network problems or server failures, a fault-tolerant topology is suggested. The distributed architecture is transparent to end-users, observing just a Web interface for an embedded device on the other side of an Internet URL

Multimedia broadcast and internet satellite system design and user trial results

The EU funded project, System for Advanced Multimedia Broadcast and IT Services (SAMBITS), has created an enhanced and synchronised, multimedia terminal for merging satellite broadcast and internet telecommunication services in a way that efficiently combines the large bandwidth of the broadcast channel and the interactivity of the internet. This paper proposes a novel broadcast and internet service concept, illustrates this concept with two service scenarios and develops a system architecture to demonstrate the range of key benefits provided by these new technologies. It then describes the interactive multimedia terminal that was used for consuming this new service concept. Finally, the results of the user trials on the terminal are presented and discussed

An integrated framework to support remote IEEE 1149.1 /1149.4 design for test experiments

Remote experiments for academic purposes can only achieve their educational goals if an appropriate framework is able to provide a basic set of features, namely remote laboratory management, collaborative learning tools and content management and delivery. This paper presents a framework developed to support remote experiments in a design for test class offered to final year students at the Electrical and Computer Engineering degree at the University of Porto. The proposed solution combines a test language command interpreter and various virtual instruments (VIs), with a demonstration board that comprises a boundary-scan IEEE 1149.1 / 1149.4 test infrastructure. The experiments are presented as embedded learning objects, with no distinction from other e-learning contents (e.g. lessons, lecture notes, etc.)

Distributed data acquisition and control system based on low cost Embedded Web servers

In the present IT age, we are in need of fully automated industrial system. To design of Data Acquisition System (DAS) and its control is a challenging part of any measurement, automation and control system applications. Advancement in technology is very well reflected and supported by changes in measurement and control instrumentation. To move to highspeed serial from Parallel bus architectures has become prevalent and among these Ethernet is the most preferred switched Serial bus, which is forward-looking and backwardcompatible. Great stride have been made in promoting Ethernet use for industrial networks and factory automation. The Web based distributed measurement and control is slowly replacing parallel architectures due to its non-crate architecture which reduces complexities of cooling, maintenance etc. for slow speed field processing. A new kind of expandable, distributed large I/O data acquisition system based on low cost microcontroller based electronic web server[1] boards has been investigated and developed in this paper, whose hardware boards use 8-bit RISC processor with Ethernet controller, and software platform use AVR-GCC for firmware and Python for OS independent man machine interface. This system can measure all kinds of electrical and thermal parameters such as voltage, current, thermocouple, RTD, and so on. The measured data can be displayed on web pages at different geographical locations, and at the same time can be transmitted through RJ-45 Ethernet network to remote DAS or DCS monitoring system by using HTTP protocol. A central embedded single board computer (SBC) can act as a central CPU to communicate between web servers automatically

Integration Of Real-Time Experiments With Internet Access

The revolution of Internet enabled instrumentation is emerging as a revolution in Measurement and Automation. New standards are being developed for transmitting data and connecting instruments to the Internet. The main purpose of this thesis is to design and develop a system to Integrate various Real time experiments and be able to monitor and control them over Internet using LabVIEW. LabVIEW is a graphical programming package capable of data acquisition, data analysis, data presentation and real time remote control. In this thesis a Real time system is developed which integrates several real time experiments and remote control access over Internet is provided using LabVIEW. The latest remote panel technology is used to provide the remote control access. There are four Real time instrument experiments developed in this thesis project. They are Automatic Mixing Controller, The Digital Storage Oscilloscope from Gould Instruments, Temperature Controller and an Electronic Recording Rain/Precipitation Gauge. These four instruments are connected and communicated from the main computer by external Data Acquisition Board (DAQ) for the Automatic Mixing Controller, By General Purpose Interface Board (GPIB) for the Oscilloscope, by Data Acquisition board (DAQ) for the Temperature controller and by Serial port for the Electronic Recording Rain/Precipitation Gauge. A system is developed to integrate all the applications listed above into one application and are monitored and controlled remotely over Internet using LabVIEW