A low cost, scalable, virtual control laboratory

This work presents a virtual control laboratory, based on a single board heater system and free and open source software, such as Scilab, Xcos, Java, PHP/MySQL and GNU/Linux. This solution allows of the order of 20 devices to be handled by a single Server PC. It allows many students to carry out control experiments remotely. It has been extensively tested in two control courses at IIT Bombay. Results of a few experiments, conducted remotely, using this setup are presented.