Abstract:

We present a remotely controlled laboratory (RCL) for the study of the chaotic pendulum, an important topic in non linear dynamic courses at undergraduate level. The remote control of this experience is based in the Arduino, an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software.
The experimental setup is located at the Physics Laboratory of the EPS (University of A Coruña). Commercially available apparatus from PASCO has been used in addition with a customized control box based on Arduino. The control box is in between the experiment hardware (CC motor, rotary motion sensor, photo gate) and the computer that has the web server. The heart of the control box is Arduino microcontroller board that uses three digital inputs to read the sensors and a digital output to control the speed of the CC motor by means of pulse-width modulation technique. The microcontroller routine reads the USB port to receive instructions from a Python program running in the server and also sends via the USB port the required values of the experiment sensors.
The program running in the server also makes a preliminary process of this data and creates some plots that the user can see through the dynamic web page in the Apache server. A more sophisticated processing of the data is possible downloading the data at the client computer.
We find that the Arduino platform delivers a promising way to complement standard lectures by high quality physics laboratory experience for remote students. All the software and the RCL control hardware are based on free open-source software and open-source hardware (FOSS&OSHW).

Keywords:

Remotely Controlled Laboratory, Physics, Chaotic Pendulum, Arduino.