Enhanced Distance Learning: A Measurement Tool for Electronics Courses

Sammanfattning: Learning outcomes in electronic courses often involve objectives that require hands-on experience in a laboratory environment. Thus, transforming such a course to be suited for distance learning might prove problematic. Using video lectures is possible but deprives the students of the ability to experiment on their own. The aim of this thesis was to mitigate the problem by developing an affordable platform providing the basic functionality of standard laboratory equipment designed for easy distribution. The resulting hardware is able to produce an 8 Vpp output signal in the range of 1 Hz to 100 kHz with a high level of accuracy both in terms of voltage level and frequency. The signal may be applied to a circuit and analyzed using two analog input channels, displaying the results on the screen of a computer connected with a USB cable. The hardware interaction is performed using a graphical interface developed to function on all major operating systems and provide a user-friendly environment. Some interference were experienced on high frequencies but we believe that the problems can be fixed with a minor redesign of the circuit board. The evaluation shows that the performance is within the specified requirements and after testing some of the typical use cases the system is concluded to be sufficient for the intended purposes.