The Electronics Laboratory Simulation

In July, 1991 I started working at the Center for Intelligent Systems on an NSF funded project to create a high fidelity simulation of an undergraduate electronics laboratory. By July, 1992 Rene Bouw, Marcel A. Dorlandt and I had built and tested a prototype of one lab of The Electronics Laboratory of the future. The results of the tests are documented in a paper published in the July, 1994 issue of the Journal of Engineering Education.

The experiment results were very encouraging, and between August, 1992 and March, 1995 I turned the experience gained into a complete lab simulation of nine experiments that are typical for a one semester electronics lab. Thanks to Ansgar Smith who built and refined simulations of a multimeter and power supply, the package now covers material that ranges from introductory ac experiments to building and analyzing second order filters.

At the NSF sponsored Project Impact conference in Washington D.C. in 1994, I met Karl Oelgeschlager, president of Falcon Software. He offered to publish the software, and since 1995 it is available as The Electronics Laboratory Simulator. A paper describing the design, features, and content is presented in the August, 1996 issue of IEEE Transactions on Education.