A virtual laboratory for distance education

With the addition of online laboratories, distance education can become more meaningful and complete. This paper presents a virtual lab established through LabVIEW data socket technology that enables the end user to design and implement control algorithms. Although this makes the problem more challenging, the quality of learning is also enhanced enormously. We demonstrate this lab through an open source, low cost, single board heater system. A large number experiments have been conducted using this setup.