Design and implementation remote laboratory based on Internet of Things: Study case in diffraction grating experiment

Teaching practicum is a learning phase that aims to complete the process of learning in higher education. In some educational institutions, teaching laboratories are not well facilitated, lack of tools, lack of maintenance staff, space and time which induce some problems in the implementation of the learning process. In this paper, a remote laboratory module for a grating experiment was introduced to solve some problem in maintaining the conventional laboratories. The remote laboratory module consists of a set of Practicum workbench, a grating (80 lines per mm), a laser source (645-655 nm, 3,0 mW), a camera and a Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi was configured as a web server, workbench controller, and image pattern acquisition system. A user could choose the distance between screen and grating through practicum website page that developed using a bootstrap module. The grating pattern (dark and light) was captured using a camera and displayed as intensity versus distance (mm) graphic in practicum website page instantly. The proposed practicum module was evaluated to performed diffraction grating experiment to compute the laser wavelength by varying the screen and grating distance. The measurement results from the remote laboratory module are then validated with the data from conventional practicum which provides 0.5% error. Finally, the proposed remote laboratory module could be expanded for another practicum module in various field.