Low-cost remote laboratories for renewable energy in distance education

Remote laboratories are nowadays essential in distance learning, as our case is, since students are not able to use face-to-face traditional laboratories. These remote laboratories can be employed by teacher within virtual classrooms, so that students can carry out their on-line experiments from anywhere and at anytime. The main drawback of these kinds of laboratories is their cost; this is more noticeable in the field of renewable energy. For this reason, this work proposes the use of low-cost remote laboratories, aimed at the study of solar and wind renewable energy. The described remote laboratory is based on using the popular robotic kit, named Lego Mindstorms NXT v2.0. robotic kit, which allows teachers to have flexibility when designing the laboratory and adapt it to the educational necessities of a course. The programming of these laboratories has been performed by using RESTful web services with Lab VIEW, a novel approach that enables users the creation of multiplatform laboratories.