I2MTC 2008 - IEEE International Instrumentation and
Measurement Technology Conference
Victoria, Vancouver Island, Canada, May 12-15, 2008
An Electronic Instrumentation Course as Part of a
Multidisciplinary Learning Project
JC Campo, FJ Ferrero, M Valledor, JC Alvarez-Alvarez, JC Alvarez-Anton, JC Viera
Universidad de Oviedo. Departamento de Ingenieria Electrica, Electronica, C y S
Edificio Departamental n°3. Campus de Viesques s/n. 33204 Gijon. Spain.
Ph. +34 985182427 Fax +34 985182138 e-mail: campoguniovi.es
Abstract - This paper describes afinal year undergraduate course
on Electronic Instrumentation. This course is part of
multidisciplinary collaboration that involves several assignments of
a last year undergraduate course in Electrical Engineering:
Computers, Electronic Instrumentation, Automatic Control and
Business Administration. The students must propose a new product,
elaborate a market survey, etc. to create a new enterprise following
the same steps than in a real case. As respect to the assignment of
Electronic Instrumentation, the students must design a prototype of
the electronic system or subsystem of the product they propose.
The main goal of this course is to cover and to integrate the
disciplines involved in instrumentation within a framework that
provides highly motivating work and to integrate this learning with
other assignments of the same course. The proposed solutions to
achieve this goal, the laboratory support, extra work, course costs
are described in this paper.
Keywords -Instrumentation, measurement, educations, sensors.
I. INTRODUCTION
Instrumentation and Measurement involves many
disciplines and is not usually a major subject at universities
[1]. Engineering technology programs that include these and
similar topics really should include courses in automatic
control systems, fundamentals of electricity and electronics,
microprocessor systems, programmable logic controllers,
chemistry, algebra, and other areas of study [2-5]. In Spain,
Bsc and Msc degree courses in Electrical and Electronic
Engineering cover also Networks, Power Electronics, etc., an
even Business Administration or Economics. The result is a
generalist engineer.
Most Spanish universities include a course on Electronic
Instrumentation which deals with measurements systems and
sensors. Different approaches to such courses are provided in
[6] and [7]. The course at the University of Oviedo, is a 60
hour one, and has both a practical and a theoretical content.
On the other hand, in our state there is a great interest in
actions to teach to the students to create an enterprise as a
medium to develop the organizational culture. Due to the
wide formation of our engineering students, there are
considered as well qualified to achieve this goal. A
significant number of the new businesses of our state have
been created by engineers. Following this interest and with
the council support, several instructors of some of the
subjects of the last year course of Electrical and Electronic
Engineering have collaborated in order to propose an
1-4244-1541-1/08/$25.00 C 2008 IEEE
integrating project. The objective is to propose a new
product, elaborate a market survey, etc. to create a new
enterprise following the same steps than in a real case. The
global project involves a lot of assignments and involves
directly half of the subjects of the course.
The instructors of the subjects involved in this project
have different objectives. As respect to the Electronic
Instrumentation subject the objectives of this course are to
design a complete electronic system including a measurement
system or subsystem involving several disciplines and
interests as usually happens in Electronic Instrumentation
designs, to clarify as many concepts of the lecture classes as
possible, to promote teamwork, and to motivate to the
students towards maximum progress. There are several
restrictions as limited budged, the limited number of credits
of the course and the problem to join the interest of several
assignments in a common project. Only the aspects
concerning to the Electronic Instrumentation course will be
described in next sections.
II. TUE ELECTRONIC INSTRUMENTATION COURSE
A. Theory-basedpart
The basic elements of a measurement system are the
sensor, the signal conditioning circuit, and a display [6].
However, most systems are more complex and include analog
to digital conversion, signal processing, and signal
transmission before or after digitalization.
| SIGNAL AAD SIGNAL Transmission
SENSOR
SlIGNAL
CONDITIONING
Transmission AAD
SIG NAL
CONVERSION PROCESSING Di SPLAY
-
(ANALOG)
Fig. 1. Typical block diagrams of instrumentation systems
About the theoretical background required, students who
undertake the theory-based course at Oviedo have already
taken courses in the fundamental of electronics A/D and D/A
conversion, and displays. The subjects related to electronics
that they have taken are: General Electronics (Analog and
Digital), Industrial Electronics (where they learn to program
microcontrollers and FPGAs), and they usually take Power prototype. A panel selects the best project proposed and a
Electronics at the same time than Electronic Instrumentation. small economic award is given to winners.
They also have take courses about computers, automatic The steps of the course are shown in Fig. 2. When the
control systems, PLCs, etc. students propose the product they are extremely ambitious
The 30 hours theory-based course (half of the course) about the product specifications in spite of instructors
essentially deals with those subjects that not yet been studied, advises. Thus, it usually necessary to reduce the
i.e. sensors for industrial measurements, the design of signal specifications of the prototypes once the design stage has
conditioning circuits, interference (Table I). begun.
TABLE I
Syllabus of the Electronic Instrumentation course at the University of
Oviedo
* Introduction to Electronic Instrumentation
* Amplification and filtering:
Errors in operational amplifiers, bandwidth, instrumentation
amplifiers, active filters
* Sensors and Signal Conditioning
- Resistive sensors: Potentiometers, RTD, Thermistors,
Strain gauges
- Inductive and electromagnetic sensors
- Capacitive sensors
- Signal generating sensors: photodiodes, Hall-effect,
piezoelectric
* Electromagnetic Interference

B. Project-basedpart
The laboratory part of the course is project-based. The
students are familiarized with oscilloscopes, power supplies,
signal generators, and typical electronic components.
However, most of the students have never designed a PCB,
bought components or soldered them.
There are three steps in the project-based part of the
course:
1. To propose the product: the students group their shelves
into teams of 4-5 people and they must propose a new
product; its preliminary interest and viability are evaluated in
other subjects and other students also participate (there are
about 10 people in a complete team). As respect to electronic
instrumentation, the instructor verifies that the prototype
includes a measurement system or subsystem so that the main
blocks shown in Fig. 1 can be practically understood. The
instructor evaluates the possibility of making a prototype
bearing in mind the characteristics of our laboratories and the
estimation of its costs. The estimated costs of each prototype
cannot exceed 300 euro and was provided by the city council
as an initiative to promote the business culture and
entrepreneurship.
2. To construct a prototype of the proposed product: a
small laboratory with three oscilloscopes, power supplies,
testers, signal generators, personal computers and soldering
equipment has been set up to enable students to carry the
extra work involved. The students can acquire the
components in an electronics component store of the city
where a foundation depending on the council has created an
account for these students.
3. Presentation of the enterprise and prototype exhibition:
The students present their enterprise and show the product
Fig. 2. Steps ofthe course.
III. RESULTS
In the two-years that this project-based learning has been
run, six products have been presented:
- Automatic fall detection device for elderly people: It was
based on the measurement of the acceleration by using a
MEMS accelerometer. The A/D conversion and signal
processing was carried out by using a microcontroller.
When fall was the detected, a SMS was sent to an
emergency phone.
- A system to control the home heating by SMS: An
electronic device was added to the plug of each of the home
heaters. This device measured the ambient temperature and
was able to receive orders via radio from a home central
unit. The central unit received the order to switch the
heaters by an SMS indicating the desired temperature of
each of the rooms. It was possible to switch each of the
heaters independently.
- An automated greenhouse: It included temperature and
humidity sensors that transmitted the information via radio
 to a central control unit, motors to open and close windows,
fans and automatic watering. The control unit included a
microcontroller (Fig. 3).
- An autonomous mower: A wire was placed around the
garden and the mower detected the limits of the garden by
detecting this wire. The machine was able to detect
obstacles and go over the garden without passing twice the
same place.
- Solar energy-operated street-lamp: In this project, to
include instrumentation and measurement concepts, the
light on-off of the lamp was automated and a virtual
instrument was programmed using LabVIEW to test the
lamps.
- Automated retractable awning for frames for drying clothes:
The students designed an infrared rain sensor and used a
microcontroller for a better detection of the rain and to
control the opening or closing of the frame using a motor.
Fig. 3. Greenhouse prototype
Although the details of each project are different, the
process followed in for the fall detection device is described
as an example: first, the students proposed the idea. The first
ideas, as an automatic pill dispenser, were rejected because
the competitors were well established. Some other ideas were
rejected due to an excessive complexity or after a market
research. The instructors of Electronic Instrumentation
considered a good idea the fall detection device because this
project includes all the blocks shown in Fig. 1 and a simple
prototype was easy to design and to construct; however, the
exact detection of a fall without mistakes is not as easy as
students could think in a first impression and the importance
of research may be explained in a real case. The market
research also offered good results. Students searched other
similar equipment in the market and the also searched papers
showing fall detection methods using, for instance, IEEE
Xplore. They designed two prototypes previous the final
version.
As in other hands-on courses [8-1 1], student motivation
and expectation are great. The effort required on part of the
instructors is considerable when compared to traditional
courses because they must interact constantly with students.
However, the benefits are well worth the effort. The course
allows important theoretical concepts explained during the
lecture classes to be reinforced through experimentation. All
of the previous shown projects include in some degree each
of the blocks shown in Fig. 1. The course provides students a
global view of instrumentation. It contributes to improving
teacher-students relations. Students state that the course
provides them with an understanding of the concept of a
complex instrumentation system also provides invaluable
experience and know-how.
One of the problems of the course is that the workload of
the students may be large; however, the implication of the
several subjects helps to distribute the workload so that the
global workload of the subjects implied does not increase
significantly. This large implication obligates to teamwork.
The lonely inventor is largely a person of the past and plays
no part in today's corporate environment [2], yet teamwork is
a completely foreign concept to nearly all students [12].
The workload of the instructors increases. For instance,
the students show difficulties using the datasheets of the
components or selecting values of the components (i.e.
although they are aware of the purpose of a decoupling
capacitor they show insecurity to decide an appropriate value
for it). For most of the students it's the first time they make a
real electronic prototype. Previous laboratory courses of the
students are traditional ones are based on a number of one-off
experiments varying according to the corresponding lecture
course. Nevertheless, lectures never make the decisions, the
provide hints, advises and indications, leaving the students to
make the final decisions. The product is not suggested
IV. CONCLUSIONS
The contents of a course in Electronic Instrumentation
may be quite different depending on the University.
Instrumentation involves a large number of disciplines, from
analogue design and software design to handling the different
elements of a typical system satisfactorily. Thus, the format
and philosophy behind the course described in this paper may
be applied elsewhere.
This course provides student involvement in complete
electronic system including a significant workload about
instrumentation and measurement, and allows the integration
of concepts about several electronics subjects and with other
subjects ofthe same course.
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