This paper presents a project still on active development by members of the group of educational innovation GSITAE "Telematic Systems Group, Applied Education". This research group was formally established in 2006 and has been recognised as group of educational innovation in 2007.

The reason behind this project is the trend pointed to by the new European Higher Education Area (EHEA), which focuses on improving student capabilities by displacing the teacher as the active subject at classroom. This implies deep changes in methods and tools, including a growing demand for extended, more flexible learning resources access schedules.

In this project we focus in one of the most important and resource consuming student training tasks: experimentation. We think that, in the future, the hours dedicated by the student to practical work and experimentation ought to be increased through the use of “open 24 hours” laboratories. These laboratories would promote “self designed” experiments, too.

Nevertheless, we think that these remote laboratory sessions must never replace nor exceed classical ones but complement them as we consider essential “hands-on” live laboratory sessions conducted by a teacher, leaving those with the most time consuming setup or limited availability to the remote lab.

To provide this “24/7” availability an open architecture platform that provide on-line access to selected experiments has been developed. As a first attempt, a previous model which controls a plate temperature using a TEC device was adapted. This model was developed by Department staff members for use it at control laboratory regular sessions. Being self-developed, knowledge about the system is complete, but commercial teaching equipment can be adapted as well.

The aim of this development is to provide an access as universal as possible. To achieve this goal we needed a multiplatform interface that was already commonly installed on personal computers, preventing this way troubles coming from the lack of necessary permissions. It was also needed that it employs common protocols for whom firewalls are opened and that are well behaved in configurations involving NATs. For these reasons we have chosen the web browser and the HTTP protocol to access experiments. Also, as students are familiarized with them, time needed to master the interface is reduced. As an additional constraint we have decide to use only Open Source software.