Remote Laboratories for Engineering Courses – “EngLabs”

Abstract

This document presents an option to enable practical classes in remote laboratories for courses in exact areas such as engineering, physics etc. An example of how a laboratory can be implemented without dependence on large investments is presented. The focus is the construction of a prototype for an experiment that can be accessed, through the Internet, without the physical presence of the user, but with real-time interactions between him and the infrastructure. The name which was chosen for the experiment, “EngLabs”, comes from (remote) Laboratories for Engineering. In it, an experiment was developed to measure the density and volume of a solid body of any geometry, regular or not, using Archimedes' Principle. The prototype was built and presented to UNIVESP in Campinas for evaluation. It was built using low-cost hardware and software resources, including Arduino, Apache server, Angular, PHP, MySQL, HTML5, Java and C++ languages. Research and interviews related to the proposed idea and similar solutions found were carried out. The used architecture, the obtained evaluations and the conclusions are presented.