E-LABORATORY PRACTICAL TEACHING FOR APPLIED ENGINEERING SCIENCES W O R K S H O P University of Oradea, Romania March 5, 2012 P R E S E N T A T I O N Project HURO/0901/028 Acronym: EPRAS Gergely Eugen Ioan, University of Oradea, Romania The content of this presentation does not necessarily represent the official position of the European Union.

Progress in networking is helping the development of high ‐ speed large networks, both wired and wireless, characterized by an unprecedented degree of transport capacity and flexibility. At the same time, laboratory equipment for learning, measurement or experimental evaluation is available, with a wide range of complexity. Activities such as distance learning, performance monitoring and testing may now become truly distributed and highly cooperative. For distance learning, other components can be added to these already complex systems, namely, those related to multimedia and immersive communications, virtual and augmented reality. Research efforts are being dedicated to the sustainable realization of e ‐ laboratories, where real and virtual instrumentation can be shared and used in internet shared environment.

One of them consists in the usage of newly developed interface devices in the field of education. Electronic systems are becoming complex, expensive and quickly changing, so that a single school or university may not have sufficient resources to keep pace with technology updates. Moreover, the students often use such complex resources for a limited amount of time. Once that a student has gained a sufficient skill level, instrumentation is no longer necessary. Hence e ‐ laboratories can be used by a greater number of students and specialized test labs can be set ‐ up, each offering a limited number of state ‐ of ‐ the ‐ art instruments and experiments via a remote access policy. Our presentation describes three e ‐ laboratory equipments and laboratory works, developed by the Lead Partner project team members.

I. APPLICATIONS OF STEPPER MOTORS The central piece of the application is a stepper motor, and its stepping modes and several practical aspect of command are being studied. I.1. Obtaining the control of the application remotely The LabVIEW application VI must be loaded on the server computer in order to obtain remote control through Internet Explorer. Once this application VI is published for web, there is only one person who can control the application at a time, because we choosed the VI not to be reentrant, for stepper motor safety reasons. Clients request control by selecting Request Control of VI at the bottom of the remote front panel window in their Web browser or by right ‐ clicking anywhere on the front panel and selecting Request Control of VI from the shortcut menu.

I.2. Work to do After launching the VI, it appears the user dialog box. If you passed the test and obtained the password to run the application, type in your name and password, click OK button and an acknowledgement message will pop up. Three aspect are important to our VI: - Controlling the stepper motor - Representing the phases currents, with contcurrentmeasurement_epras.vi - Using a web camera in order the remote clients to see the actual motor

II. APPLICATIONS OF COMBINATIONAL LOGIC CIRCUITS The work uses digital integrated circuits and software for controlling hardware structure. Integrated decoders are studied: BCD/decimal, and BCD/7_segment driver. Electronic structure is designed for multiplexed display. Binary sequences generated will change the display content or active digit. Display digits are obtained from decoded binary numbers. Changes are operable from interactive screen. Interface with the electronic display system is provided via a PC, extended with a digital input /output device.

Decoders are digital integrated circuits designed for digital conversion. Are dedicated circuits for the comparison of a number written in binary input with a decimal identifiable out of circuit. There are digital circuits designed for functional equivalence. An example is a command decoder for display, which provides the correspondence between a binary number with a useful electronic equivalent of a digital display control. Decoder has n inputs and outputs up to m=2n. Technology integration is corresponding to MSI (medium scale integration).

Displays can be LED or LCD. LED displays are structures whose monolithic LED components will be one of the common terminal (anode or Katod). If all anodes were wired together, the display is common anode configuration and binary decoder with 7segments lines will provide information on the active 0 logic.

III. APPLICATIONS OF ABB ROBOTS The first and most important requirement in internet applications is security. Another critical issue is the possibility that multiple users are simultaneously enabled to interact with remote instruments or devices. For program development of these systems, two well ‐ known programming environments are LabVIEW from National Instruments, and VEE from Agilent Technologies. They can publish on the Internet a graphical front panel of a virtual instrument so a user can interact with virtual instruments through a browser. Another interesting feature is that it is possible to design graphical applications that share software objects through the Internet.

Regarding the robot programming, for the ABB IRB 1600 robot the ABB ‐ PC Interface IRC5 module can be used. The PC Interface provides the communication interface between the robot controller and a network connected PC. This allows external clients to connect to the IRC5 Controller. The PC Interface offers system parameter update, RAPID programming and recording of the robot log file. With the PC Interface, RobotStudio Online can connect to a controller over a LAN. If the PC Interface option is missing, RobotStudio Online only connects through the local service port. Another facility is offered by Robot Application Builder (RAB) which allows system integrators and end users to program their own operator interfaces for the IRC5 robot controller. For security reasons a human operator will supervise the operation of the robot with the Flex Pendant, having the possibility to stop any action in case of hazardous movements.

Experimental 3D position sensing system

3D graphical user interface

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