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2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION
powered by current industrial applications has yet to be de-
scribed. The rest of this paper is organized as follows.Section II
gives a brief description of the educational integration of the
designs into the curriculum. Section III explains the software
selected, the hardware designed to go with this software, and
the components of the new SCADA experiments. Section IV
gives the results achieved of both quantitative and qualitative
evaluations. Finally, these results are discussed.
II. EDUCATIONAL INTEGRATION
The SCADA course “SCADA Systems” plays a funda-
mental role in the two-year curriculum of the Control and
Automation Program at Ege Technical and Business College
(ETBC), Ege University, İzmir, Turkey. The courses leading
up to SCADA Systems, which is given in the fourth and last
semester of the curriculum, include Basic Electronics, Digital
Electronics, Electronic Measurement Techniques and Safety,
Computer Aided Circuit Design, Sensor and Transducers, Mi-
crocontrollers, Process Measurement I & II, Process Control,
Programmable Logic Controllers, and Microcontroller-Based
Control; each of these recommends textbooks as supplementary
material on their course Web page. Students thus begin the
SCADA Systems course with a uniform background knowl-
edge provided by these earlier courses. For example, in Process
Control, students are taught the standards of the Instrument
Society of America (ISA) such as Instrumentation Symbols and
Identification (ISA5.1), Binary Logic Diagrams for Process
Operations (ISA-5.2), Graphic Symbols for Distributed Con-
trol/Shared Display Instrumentation, Logic and Computer
Systems (ISA-5.3), and Instrument Loop Diagrams (ISA-5.4);
these standards are necessary to establish communication for
SCADA.
The learning objectives of the course, updated in 2010, are
that students should do the following:
1) understand the fundamental concepts of a SCADA system
and its various components such as electronics, computers,
and communication systems;
2) be able to configure the SCADA software package pro-
gram and determine the needs for the SCADA system from
given information;
3) learn communication protocols used for computerized
system control;
4) be able to install and run real application setups using the
software;
5) be able to analyze the overall SCADA system software and
the various elements of communication-based hardware.
SCADA Systems, given in the fourth semester, is given in
one 4-h session per week. Its syllabus is given in Table I.
III. EXPERIMENTS
Microcontroller-based experimental setups were designed
to carry out seven consecutive experiments. The first four
of these experiments—on the RS232 serial port, IEEE 1284
D-25 parallel port, the use of a digital thermometer, and tem-
perature and liquid-level instrumentation [15], [16]—were
explained in a previous study [2]. Three new experiments—on
TABLE I
SYLLABUS OF SCADA SYSTEMS
using a USB port, controlling a USB-based Cartesian robot,
and controlling a TCP/IP-based robot arm—are explained in
Sections III-A–III-C.
A. Software Selection
The choice of control and automation software is very im-
portant issue for engineering applications and education. The
selection criteria were explained in detail in a recent study [8].
The LabVIEW 8.5 evaluation copy (to use USB and TCP/IP
ports) was chosen for SCADA education in the SCADA Sys-
tems course because of its minimal cost.
B. Experimental Setups
The laboratory is equipped with 10 experimental setups,
each comprising a PC, an application set, a multimeter, an
oscilloscope, and necessary software. The PCs, with a Core2
3300 MHz processor and 2 GB of memory, run MS Windows
XP Professional and LabVIEW 8.5 [17] evaluation software.
An experimental SCADA system consists of DAQ hardware
and development software. DAQ hardware, composed of an
analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a digital-to-analog
converter (DAC), is used to acquire and control the phys-
ical phenomena with sensors and actuators, respectively. VIs
in LabVIEW are commonly used in programming SCADA
systems for logging data from a DAQ system with a flexible
GUI [18].
A peripheral interface circuit (PIC)-based SCADA system is
preferred for experiments because PLC-based systems are very
expensive to use for education [19]. PIC-based experimental
setups serve as the signal conditioner, data acquirer, and con-
troller for interface circuits. Their internal software supports the
GUI developed in LabVIEW.
In this study, three different PIC microcontroller boards
were designed and used in experiments: The PIC16F877,
PIC18F4550, and PIC18F452 are used for serial and parallel
port-based experimental setups, USB-based experimental
setups, and TCP/IP-based experimental setups, respectively.
These microcontrollers include internal flash program memory,
a large area of RAM, internal EEPROM, and eight channel
ADCs. They are thus suitable for real-time systems and moni-
toring applications [6].
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ŞAHIN AND İŞLER: MICROCONTROLLER-BASED ROBOTICS AND SCADA EXPERIMENTS 3
TABLE II
GRADING SCHEME SHOWING THE MARKS AVAILABLE FOR EACH PART OF THE SEVEN EXPERIMENTS: 1—RS232 SERIAL PORT COMMUNICATION; 2—IEEE
1284 PARALLEL PORT COMMUNICATION; 3—DIGITAL THERMOMETER; 4—TEMPERATURE & LIQUID-LEVEL CONTROL; 5—USB PORT COMMUNICATION;
6—USB-BASED CARTESIAN ROBOT; 7—TCP/IP-BASED ROBOT ARM. (“N/A” MEANS THAT ITEM IS NOT PART OF THAT EXPERIMENT)
C. Experiments
LabVIEW software is used to implement the front panel and
the block diagram. The block diagram holds the data flow and
graphical source codes, which is useful for designing an HMI
for robotics and automation systems. The front panel provides
switches, counters, timers, and graphs in order to monitor and
control the experiments. The block diagram supplies data flow
and function tools with connectors, terminals, and wires. Each
of the seven consecutive SCADA experiments is carried out in
four distinct stages: 1) hardware properties; 2) software proper-
ties; 3) integration of the hardware and the software; and 4) eval-
uation of lab reports. The students were introduced to the exper-
imental setups and PIC units and were then requested to develop
their own PIC program and front-panel GUI with VI programs
in LabVIEW. Table II shows the contributions of each step for
evaluation of the experiment. Students are allowed to hand their
reports in any official time in the following week.
Implementations of the first four experiments are designed to
use a PIC16F877-based hardware of the simple setup described
in the authors’ previous paper [2]. Three additional advanced
experiments (#5–#7) use a USB port, a USB-based Cartesian
robot, and a TCP/IP-based robot arm.
1) Implementation of the USB Port: This experiment con-
nects the PIC18F4550 board and graphical programming using
LabVIEW via a USB port. Students are expected to read the
status of switches and send these values to the LEDs through
the USB port. This experiment helps students to understand the
basics of the DAQ and digital communication protocols using a
USB port.
2) Implementation of the USB-Based Cartesian Robot: This
experiment connects the PIC18F4550 board with a general-pur-
pose step motor driver card to the USB port, implementing real-
time controlling and monitoring for a three-axis system. The
Cartesian robot has three axes, and thus has three degrees of
freedom (DOF); these -, -, and -axes are controlled by a mi-
crocontroller board and step motor drivers via the LabVIEW-
designed GUI. Limit switches are used to prevent it passing the
borders of each axis. Students follow these steps.
a) Generate a USB-HMI driver using the “VISA Driver De-
velopment Wizard” and “VISA Interactive Controller” in
National Instruments’ VISA program.
b) Adjust the reference point to zero for the three axes using
the reset button.
c) Control the - - -axes of the Cartesian robot via the GUI.
d) Transfer the axes’ coordinate and limit value data between
the computer and microcontroller card.
e) Control the step motors with pulse-width modulation
(PWM) using a proportional control algorithm.
f) Monitor the GUI.
This experiment is designed as an advanced-level application
to show students how a complex real-time application can be
designed.
3) Implementation of the TCP/IP-Based Robot Arm: The
last experiment is a multiexperimental system designed for con-
necting to the PIC18F452 board via TCP/IP communication
protocol, using the TCP/IP port. The robot arm with its three
DOF and its gripper are driven by servomotors via a micro-
controller board and a LabVIEW-designed GUI. In addition,
this experiment also includes temperature readings and an 8-bit
input/output (I/O). The thermometer part of this experimental
setup is realized using a DS1820 sensor. The 8-bit I/O part is
implemented as were the serial port in Exp. #1 and the USB port
in Exp. #5. The embedded TCP/IP port means the experimental
system can be used for WAN and LAN applications. Students
follow these steps.
a) Generate TCP/IP and uni-datagram protocol (UDP)
drivers using LabVIEW function blocks.
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4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION
TABLE III
STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF EXAMINATION GRADES ( NUMBER OF
STUDENTS)
Fig. 1. Mean grades of all enrolled students (lower line) and students passing
the course (upper line).
b) Control the robot arm via a LabVIEW-designed GUI.
c) Control servomotors with PWM used as proportional con-
trol for their states.
d) Monitor the GUI.
e) Read the status of switches and send this value to the
LEDs through the TCP/IP port.
This experiment is also designed as a SCADA-based robotics
application.
IV. EVALUATION
The experimental setup and the suite of seven experiments
were evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively.
A. Quantitative Evaluation
The exam results over eight years of the SCADA Systems
course were analyzed using SPSS statistical software. In the first
three of these years, the experimental setup was not in place. The
next two years featured the simple setup (Experiments 1–4), and
the last three featured the complete setup (Experiments 1–7).
The course had the same teacher, this paper’s first author, for
all eight years. All the exams were prepared and graded by
this teacher; their questions were determined by considering
Bloom’s Taxonomy, a classification of educational learning ob-
jectives [20]. Therefore, throughout this period, the exams may
be considered to be as similar as possible, and the experimental
setup can be thought of as the major factor affecting student per-
formance in the course. Table III gives the statistical results.
Fig. 1 shows the mean grades over eight years of both all
enrolled students and of the students who passed the exam. As
TABLE IV
TEST OF THE HOMOGENEITY OF VARIANCES
TABLE V
ANOVA-TEST RESULTS FOR DIFFERENCES TO SHOW THE EFFECTS OF SETUP
ON STUDENTS’ EXAM RESULTS
TABLE VI
STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF EXAMINATION GRADES ( NUMBER OF
STUDENTS)
can be seen in Table III, there was a substantial improvement in
mean grades after the introduction to the laboratory both of the
simple setup and advanced setup.
To analyze the statistical differences over these eight years,
further statistical procedures were followed [2]. The statistical
distributions of the eight-year grades were assumed to be normal
upon visual inspection. Then the homogeneity of variances of
grades had to be tested. The Levene statistic is probably the most
commonly used test for this purpose in normal-distributed data.
Applying this test (Table IV), the value shows that the
hypothesis on the homogeneity of variances is valid.
A one-way ANOVA analysis was performed at 0.05 signif-
icance level using the SPSS software package. Table V gives
the test result as , which means that there is a statis-
tically significant difference between years. However, this test
does not indicate which years differ from others. To see this,
Tukey’s honestly significant difference (HSD) test, a multiple
comparison test in statistics, is applied, as in Table VI.
These results classify student exam performance in three
distinct groups: no experimental setup, the simple setup, and
the advanced setup. The last rows show the statistical signifi-
cance for each group. If the significance is greater than 0.05,
that group may be assumed to be statistically indistinguishable.
For example, student grades for 2003–2004, 2004–2005, and
2005–2006 must be considered statistically similar. Those
for 2006–2007 and 2007–2008 and those of 2008–2009,
2009–2010 and 2010–2011 are also similar. However, those
for 2005–2006 and 2006–2007 cannot be considered similar.
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ŞAHIN AND İŞLER: MICROCONTROLLER-BASED ROBOTICS AND SCADA EXPERIMENTS 5
The exam results indicate that there were statistically signif-
icant improvements both after the simple setup and after the
advanced setup.
B. Qualitative Evaluation
A five-question survey was given at the end of the semester
to obtain a qualitative evaluation of the performance of the ex-
perimental setup and experiments, using a Likert scale of Very
Poor, Poor, Average, Good, and Excellent. The questions were
as follows.
1) Do you think this course provides a deep understanding of,
and application experience in, the subject of interest?
2) Do you think the educational materials used in the context
of this course are adequate?
3) How does this course affect your motivation to continue
your education in the field of automation?
4) Do you think this course provided you with the experience
necessary for your professional life?
5) How useful did you find this course in your automation
education?
The survey results are summarized in Fig. 2(a) for the
simple experimental setup and in Fig. 2(b) for the advanced
experimental setups. The answers to the first and second ques-
tions show that most students agree that the SCADA Systems
course helps them achieve the required desired level in terms
of knowledge, experience, and educational materials. For the
third question, 72% of students say that the course strongly mo-
tivated them in the field of automation technologies. Answers
to the fourth question are in a somewhat different category in
that students do not as yet have a professional life; this could
account for the higher level of answers of Poor and Average.
For the last question, students evaluated the lectures and found
them adequate. Responses to the last question are very similar
to those for the first three questions.
V. DISCUSSION
Turkey, and other developing countries, must keep up with
modern technology for their industries to be able to compete in
world markets. Since SCADA and other hardware devices may
be beyond the budgets of the educational institutions of such
countries, it is crucial to be able to implement teaching based on
more affordable simulation tools. This paper has described the
teaching of the concepts of industrial automation, data acquisi-
tion, instrumentation, using widely used communication ports
(such as serial, parallel, USB, and TCP/IP), virtual instrumen-
tation, and its development with LabVIEW. Acquiring experi-
mental knowledge of these matters by means of seven labora-
tory experiments helps students to integrate the theoretical con-
cepts. Although an evaluation copy of LabVIEW was used in
the study to achieve minimal cost, the Internet-based commu-
nication technologies that are an important part of distributed
systems such as SCADA [17] were also included. As a result,
the experimental setups offer a good alternative to commercial
ones.
In addition, although this study had the goal of designing an
experimental setup and experiments for the undergraduate level,
these are also suitable for use in degree programs in electrical,
Fig. 2. Student responses to each survey question for the (a) simple setup and
(b) advanced setups.
electronics, and control engineering in courses in control, instru-
mentation, and SCADA. The experimental setup is also suitable
for project-based learning systems, and so can easily be inte-
grated by engineering institutions and technical colleges that use
project-based learning strategies. The course was modified over
an eight-year period to achieve the desired learning outcomes.
The exam results, analyzed in Table VI, indicate that there
were three different statistically significant groups. It could
be concluded that using experimental setups is essential to
understanding technical subjects, and the more complex the
experiments, the greater the students’ success. In addition,
students stressed in oral feedback sessions that complex
applications would help in increasing their motivation and
self-confidence. Such setups can therefore be used for demon-
stration sessions to attract student attention and improve their
motivation. Almost all student feedback was positive except
that from students who had poor class attendance. Nevertheless,
both the experimental setup and the experimental content have
been gradually improved on the basis of this feedback.
Because of the limitations of the evaluation version of
LabVIEW, students were not introduced to the concepts of
reading input data from the database and writing output data to
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6 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EDUCATION
the database, nor to some other important concepts such as SQL
operations and database security. This lack was addressed by
recommending textbooks related to these topics [21], [22] and
will be further addressed by their inclusion in graduate-level
courses.
Implementation details of both hardware and software are
available upon request from the second author via e-mail and
will be more widely available as soon as the course Web site is
online.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank M. B. Öner, B. Kadioğlu, and
O. Ergünay for their contributions during implementation of the
setups, and M. Ölmez and M. B. Selek for encouragement to
extend the study and to write this paper.
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Savaş Şahin received the B.Sc. degree in electronics and communication en-
gineering from Kocaeli University, Kocaeli, Turkey, in 1996, the M.Sc. degree
in electrical and electronics engineering from Ege University, Izmir, Turkey, in
2003, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Dokuz
Eylül University, Konak, Turkey, in 2010.
He was an Instructor with the Department of Control and Automation, Ege
Business and Technical College, Ege University, from 2000 to 2012. He has
been working as Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical and Elec-
tronics Engineering, İzmir Katip Çelebi University, Izmir, Turkey, since 2012.
His main research interests are in the fields of control systems, industrial au-
tomation, chaotic systems, and artificial neural networks.
Yalçin İşler (S’09–M’11) received the B.Sc. degree in electrical and electronics
engineering from Anadolu University, Eskişehir, Turkey, in 1993, the M.Sc.
degree in electronics and communication engineering from Süleyman Demirel
University, Isparta, Turkey, in 1996, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and elec-
tronics engineering from Dokuz Eylül University, İzmir, Turkey, in 2009.
From 1993 to 2000, he was a Lecturer with Burdur Vocational School,
Süleyman Demirel University. He worked as a Software Engineer from 2000
to 2002. He was a Research Assistant with Zonguldak Karaelmas University,
Zonguldak, Turkey, from 2002 to 2003 and with Dokuz Eylül University from
2003 to 2010. He was an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical
and Electronics Engineering, Zonguldak Karaelmas University, from 2010 to
2012. He has been working as an Assistant Professor with the Department
of Biomedical Engineering, İzmir Katip Çelebi University, Izmir, Turkey,
since 2012. His main research interests are in the fields of biomedical signal
processing, computational neuroscience, genetic algorithms, and microcon-
troller-based board design.