Design of Novel Online Access and Control Interface for Remote Experiment on DC Drives

Internet has revolutionized the way in which the information is delivered. Laboratory based courses play an important role in technical education. Automation is changing the nature of these laboratories and the system designer’s focus on Internet accessed experiments owing to the availability of several tools to integrate electronic and mechanical hardware with the World Wide Web. Stand-alone approaches in remote learning have grown tremendously in the recent years. One of the important components in remote experimentation is the integration of Virtual Instruments to perform real hardware tasks in near real-time. The paper describes a web interface to the electrical hardware and integration of LabVIEW Virtual Instruments to the remote access and control of DC Drives. Customized electrical hardware serves as the web interface, supporting various features to remotely control and measure the parameters of the electrical machine. Novel techniques have been used to interface a low power data acquisition system with the DC machine driven by the AC power supply. The system uses the client-server architecture to access the web page of the Virtual Instruments through web browser. The developed system imitates the real control of experiment hardware, but being operated remotely through Internet.