Building Reusable Remote Labs with Adaptable Client User-Interfaces

Nowadays remote laboratories suffer the absence of reusability. In addition, their construction and maintenance require time, money and skills. The system implementation of a specific remote lab is neither generic nor reusable. In this paper, a solution for a reusable remote lab dedicated for disparate types of scientific and engineering experiments is presented. The experiment designer needs only to connect the experiment components and equipment such as capacitors, resistors, transistors, function generators with a switch system of a lab server, then, she/he has to map this connection structure in a configuration data structure. Once a student starts the Web-based client user-interface and logs-in into the lab server, the menu structure of the graphical user-interface builds and initializes itself automatically, using information stored in a configuration data structure. This contribution discusses some hitherto used lab servers, some of their drawbacks, the desirable requirements on a universal remote lab, which simplify the building process of newer lab experiments consisting of experiment components and equipment as well as a client user-interface that could enable students to remotely access the experiment.