Virtual instrumentation platform for power electronics education

The advent of portable devices has a significant impact on the manufacturing industry. Remote programming, monitoring, diagnosis, debugging and configuration are now possible by using off-the-shelf PDAs or cellular phones. In a similar manner, education for certain fields of electronics will have to also move forward, to embrace new technologies not so obvious related with that fields. A new type of Virtual Instrument is described in this application note, one that is capable of using the latest advances in mobile computing and communication technologies to solve measurement and control applications. Mobile technologies are a new chapter of monitoring and testing industries. The paper presented the results of some educational projects, developed and oriented to graphical programming for small size nodes and distributed measurements nodes, applicable to MCM and power electronics.