Sabuncu, A., & Thornton, K. (2022, August), Leveraging ThingsBoard IoT Service for Remote Experimentation  Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41494

\bibitem{asee_peer_41494}
  Sabuncu, A., \& Thornton, K. (2022, August), \emph{Leveraging ThingsBoard IoT Service for Remote Experimentation}
  Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, Minneapolis, MN.
  10.18260/1-2--41494

Ahmet Sabuncu and Kerri Thornton.  "Leveraging ThingsBoard IoT Service for Remote Experimentation".  2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN, 2022, August.  ASEE Conferences, 2022.  https://peer.asee.org/41494 Internet.  15 Dec, 2024

\bibitem{asee_peer_41494}
  Ahmet Sabuncu and Kerri Thornton.
  "Leveraging ThingsBoard IoT Service for Remote Experimentation".
  \emph{2022 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, Minneapolis, MN, 2022, August}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2022.
  https://peer.asee.org/41494 Internet.  15 Dec, 2024

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_41494
author = "Ahmet Sabuncu and Kerri Thornton"
title = "Leveraging ThingsBoard IoT Service for Remote Experimentation"
booktitle = "2022 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition"
year = "2022"
month = "August"
address = "Minneapolis, MN"
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/41494}
number = {10.18260/1-2--41494}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - The goal of this study is to demonstrate the use of Internet of Things (IoT) technology to enable remote experimentation in mechanical engineering. In the 2021 ASEE Virtual Conference, we have shown one-way data transfer from an evaporative cooler setup, where students could remotely acquire data using Google Sheets. In this work, we describe a different scheme of IoT structure, where students could both acquire data and control equipment. We use an inexpensive (essentially no-cost for the community edition) opensource IoT platform, ThingsBoard. This software allows students to view dashboards that enable remote control of sensors and actuators, include livestreaming and live data as both plots or live numbers, and even allow students to download data for further analysis. 

Our remote lab is an evaporative cooler designed to teach students about psychometrics, the thermodynamics of atmospheric air. The cooling effect is achieved by the phase transition of water in an evaporative pad. The experimental setup includes temperature and humidity sensors at the up-and downstream of the evaporative material. Students also can control a fan that blows air through the evaporative material. All sensors and actuators are connected to an Arduino board and a Raspberry Pi single-board computer, which interface to the ThingsBoard service for remote control and data acquisition. Finally, to facilitate a live view of the experimental setup in ThingsBoard, a Raspberry Pi also employs a camera that provides a live video feed of the entire setup while it is at work. We offer this exercise to students in a junior-level Engineering Experimentation course in a technological university. We report our findings in terms of students’ perception of the experiment and student success in meeting the learning objectives. We also report our experience in having multiple users use a single remote experimentation setup. Ultimately, we hope to match the trend of increasingly prevalent online learning with a low-cost solution where students have “almost” hands-on experimentation while also gaining invaluable skills in the world of IoT.

AU  - Ahmet Sabuncu
AU  - Kerri Thornton
CY  - Minneapolis, MN
DA  - 2022/08/23
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Leveraging ThingsBoard IoT Service for Remote Experimentation
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/41494
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--41494
ER  -