At-home system and controls laboratories

We are piloting the concept of distributed laboratories in the form of kits that students take home and work on much like a problem set. The kits have an embedded microcontroller and communicate to the student's home PC over a serial port. The home PC provides the needed computational horsepower for experiment control, data collection, data analysis and reporting. The microcontroller handles real-time control tasks. Two kits have been developed, a fourth-order, linear mass-spring-damper system for frequency response and system identification, and an analog filtering system that uses music and synthetic sound as an input. Based on the experiences with and evaluation of the first generation modules, an improved second generation module that adds PID control is under development.