A laboratory experiment for teaching automation inspired by the smart home

This paper presents a laboratory experiment for teaching Automation. The objective of this project is to allow the students of the Technical Engineering Schools of the University of La Laguna (Spain) to learn the theoretical and practical fundamentals of Automation Systems through a laboratory experiment based on a home automation application. Automation plays an increasingly important role in the centred of Engineering; as a result, several subjects in the curriculum plan at the Engineering School focus on this discipline. In recent years, our teaching efforts have been centred on designing appealing and modern laboratory experiments. With these practical experiments, students acquire a basic knowledge of Automation, along with complementary knowledge of the latest developments in the field. The laboratory session presented in this article draws its inspiration from the Smart Home, a recent field in applied Automation. Due to the impossibility of carrying out the control of a smart installation in a real house, a simulation experiment was designed for educational tasks. A scale model of a house was built, and all the sensors, the actuators and the control system were adapted to this scale model. A Programmable Logic Controller was selected as the control system. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 21:E121–E131, 2013