Bruno Andò, Nicola Pitrone
NEW TREND IN LABORATORY SESSIONS

Due to growing classes, reduced availability of tutors and shortage of time to be devoted to experimental activities, there is a need of finding a mandatory way ofperforming laboratory sessions. The advanced technologies allowing for a massive use of remote driven instruments could improve the quality of the experiments especially for what concerns the very specific high-level classes. In order to give flexibility and high performances to the educational tool a user friendly virtual instrument has been realised: it allows the choice of boot the experiment to be performed by the user and the procedure to be followed without loosing the contact with real instrumentation.

Petr Kocourek, Jiří Novák
TEACHING OF FPGA APPLICATIONS IN INSTRUMENTATION

Programmable logic seems to be a future of the digital design. To acquaint students with this technology, a new subject was prepared to fill the blank space in their knowledge. The laboratory practice is primarily focused on applications in instrumentation and is supported by newly designed development boards, which contain most of the components necessary for student’s designs. This paper briefly describes approaches and teaching methods and demonstrates them on selected laboratory projects.

Vladimir Haasz
CHANGES IN EDUCATION OF MEASUREMENT AND INSTRUMENTATION AT CTU IN PRAGUE CAUSED BY IMPLEMENTATION OF BOLOGNA DECLARATION

Changes in study programmes at the Czech Technical University in Prague based on the Bologna declaration concern also the education of Measurement and Instrumentation. The bachelor stage and the master stage are strictly separated in the new study plans. The amount of theoretical courses going before technological courses rapidly decrease in the bachelor stage. It requires both to change the teaching method and to skip some theoretically exacting parts. The change of the whole structure leads also to the reduction of an extent of all courses. The new conception leads also to the changes in the master stage - the additional courses of theoretical disciplines are planned here to compensate the low amount of theoretical courses in the bachelor stage. The paper aims to show how we are trying to solve it in the branch Measurement and Instrumentation.

G. Canfora, P. Daponte, S. Rapuano
REMOTELY ACCESSIBLE LABORATORY FOR ELECTRONIC MEASUREMENT TEACHING

The paper presents a remotely accessible laboratory realised for didactic aims at the University of Sannio, Italy. The laboratory is based on a software framework, with modularity characteristics that allows the insertion of new applications or the modification of the realised ones. Thanking to its implementation in Java and C++ with a CORBA communication layer, some instruments have been made available to the students of electronic measurements courses through a simple web browser in the form of Virtual Instruments.

Cristian Zet, Marinel Temneanu, Cristian Foşalău, Mihai Creţu
TESTING TOTAL HARMONIC DISTORTION FOR SAMPLE AUTORANGING SYSTEMS

In the process of data acquisition the analogic gain is usually determined by the peak value of the input ignal. For all samples the quantization error is theoretically less than 1/2 LSB. However for samples having small value, the relative error due to the quantization is high, and it goes higher with the decreasing of the sample value. The relative measuring error can be reduced by dynamically setting the proper gain [1]. This is usually achieved with a supplementary hardware arrangement. The solution was proposed in [1] and consists in a numeric algorithm, developed in LabView, which replaces the hardware. The same signal is measured on many channels, set up with different gains, and the input signal is rebuild, choosing the samples measured with the maximum accuracy from all the channels. Sample translation must be performed due to the inter-channel delay. The main ideea in this paper is to test if the method does not affect the acquisition results ecause of different gains and delays of the amplifier. Other errors are introduced by the coarsely pproximation when samples from different channels are translated to the reference. Following this, total harmonic distorsion and total harmonic distorsion & noise are evaluated for the system presented in [1], according to the IEEE standard 1057-1994 for digitizing waveform recorders. Comparison between simulation and experiment will be also presented in the extended paper.