Towards Cost-Effective On-Line Laboratories

Our aim is to develop the means to provide staff and students with remote access to laboratory equipment using the internet. The idea that students can operate laboratory equipment remotely to allow flexibility in learning styles is not new. However, there are few instances of this reported, possibly because implemeting such schemes is often expensive and complex. Our aim is to provide this facility in a cost-effective manner. We have made substantial progress towards our aims. We have demonstrated that LabView provides a useful software environment with a wide range of hardware connectivity, multiple platform support, with the ability to support distributed application software over the internet. Our experience in building web-operated telerobots since 1994 has provided us with useful models for designing the software to enable collaboration between users. The server and backbone of the software has been designed to provide a rugged, maintainable framework. This allows students to build software modules needed to add specific laboratory experiments to the system. By following templates and simple design rules they can produce easily maintainable software. The hardware can easily be maintained by our technicians