Facilitating Supervision of Student Groups in a Remote Laboratory System Design

This chapter presents a laboratory environment that is designed with a focus on ease of use and to improve instructors’ ability to supervise students in a laboratory exercise on development of communication protocols. The experiment is set up with microcontrollers connected to transceivers for an RS-485 bus. The students are guided through the development and implementation of a communication protocol and are challenged with making decisions on all the different choices that leads up to the implementation of the protocol. The students then test the implemented protocol to verify its expected behavior and what effect their choices have on the performance and stability of the implemented protocol. The laboratory setup is designed to aid the supervisor in this process by presenting all necessary information in an easily accessible user interface. This will relieve the supervisor’s burden involved in retrieving and discovering this information, allowing more effort to be spent on the supervision process. Trials show more happy students and a pleased supervisor.