Abstract:

There are practically infinite methods for teaching classical contents of Electronical Instrumentation, Automation and related to the current concept of Industry 4.0. However, the very limited teaching resources, the reduced number of laboratory resources which are available for students and the absence of specific commercial and didactical equipment imply that it results necessary the design of own equipment to carry out practical exercises related to these subjects, and more specifically in the environment of a School of Naval and Ocean Engineers [1].

This work describes a practical equipment based on Lego©Technics [2] and Compact-Rio (CRIO) embedded computer [3] for teaching different concepts from a modern electronical instrumentation course. It was conceived, designed, developed and put into operation by the Electrical and Electronics Group from the ETS Ingenieros Navales at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. The proposed equipment emulates the measurement of weight, subsequent classification and freezing of fish in a fishing vessel. The equipment is composed by a Lego model, some small electronic circuits of our own design and construction, and the connection of different sensors and actuators to different CRIO modules and to an Embedded CPU [3]. All the required magnitudes are processed in the Labview Environment [4]. Students spent about 25 hours on programming their virtual instrument and they verify the correct operation of the system in the presence of a teacher who can cause different types of malfunction with the aim to validate that the program is well done.

Students acquire knowledge in fields related to the current concepts of Industry 4.0 and electronic instrumentation, such as:
• Distributed and Modular instrumentation
• Industrial Internet of the Things (IIoT)
• PLC-Based Automation
• Estimation of physical magnitudes
• Dynamic Supervision for Alarms Management

Keywords:

Industry 4.0, Electronic Instrumentation, Automation.