Work in progress - virtual lab for electronic engineering curricula

During last years the interest on distance learning techniques has grown steadily as far as the use of electronic instruments in experimentation is concerned. Due to the higher and higher number of students accessing the university educational structures, the cost of laboratories for didactical electronic applications is going to be very high. As a consequence, a number of software tools and environments have been developed to help users to share distributed laboratory resources and realize virtual experiments. Nevertheless, further solutions have to be explored when students must be trained and experienced in the instrumentation programming. In this paper, we exploit modern software technologies to design and implement a distributed architecture for virtual labs allowing the approach previously described. Services integrated in this architecture aim to support students both to keep contact with real instruments both to remotely program instrumentation. This distance learning methodology is discussed and some reports from students experience with the system are showed.