Abstract
A lightweight Web Service and a Web site interfacehave been developed, which enable remote measurements ofelectronic devices as a “virtual laboratory” for undergraduateengineering classes. Using standard browsers without additionalplugins (such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, or even Safari on aniPhone), remote users can control a Keithley source-measurementunit and monitor results in real time from anywhere onthe Internet. As an in-class example, students in a solid-stateelectronics course used the Web site interface to make real-timetransistor measurements. Recommendations are made on how tobest integrate the interface into electronics classes based on thestudent assignment responses. The present interface is flexible andcould be expanded to many other devices and instruments. Thesource code has been openly posted online.Index Terms—Educational technology, engineering education,metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs),online services, virtual laboratory.
I. INTRODUCTION
MANY contemporary engineering courses are heavilytheoretical, particularly for disciplines where settingup experimental labs is costly. One such example is a semiconductorelectronics course, where transistor theory is taughtwithout access to experimental data, which is only availablein state-of-the-art industrial or research labs. As an alternative,virtual online laboratories can expose students to hands-onlearning without incurring the high costs of instructional facilities.Measurement instruments can be connected and controlledby a computer for data capture [1]. This capability has enabledvirtual laboratories on the World Wide Web (WWW), allowingmany users to access a single instrument. While Web-basedremote instrument control has been investigated for over adecade, most implementations have been “heavyweight” approachesrelying on Web servers with Java or PHP HypertextProcessor (PHP) scripts [1]–[3]. These often require users todownload a 100-MB LabView or Java browser plugin [4], [5]in addition to having a compliant browser [6]. Other remotelaboratories require the measurement software itself, such asLabView [7].This paper describes the design and development of a lightweightWeb Service (WS) for making remote measurementson electronic devices, which operates within standard Webbrowsers and does not require any downloads. The WS currentlyallows users to perform typical transistor measurementsand has been tested in a classroom environment to gather studentfeedback. In addition, the WS could be easily extended todifferent applications, such as remote measurements of bionanotechnologyor micromechanical devices. Remote users of thisWS control a Keithley 2612 instrument with standard browserswithout plugins and monitor their results in real time from anycomputer or Web-browsing mobile device (Fig. 1). The serversoftware successfully places student test requests into a queue,conducts the tests in order, and provides ongoing measurementresults to all connected users. Finally, in order to encouragefurther development of other systems based on this work, theproject code has been posted online as open-source [8].This paper is organized as follows. First, Section II describesthe server setup and Web site interface. Section III presents aspecific application example of the Web site in an undergraduateelectronics course. This section also discusses studentfeedback and guidelines for future improvements. Finally,Section IV concludes the paper by summarizing the key points


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