Smartphone application for photograph-based automatic solving of electronic circuits for distance learning

Resumen

Since the global pandemic declaration due to the spread of COVID-19, situations of confinement have been common for those students affected by this disease, either directly or through close contacts. In such cases, there have been situations in which some students did not have all the material resources necessary to complement their studies, such as up-to-date computers or webcams, thus increasing the digital gap. However, generally most students have a smartphone with a built-in camera.In this work, we considered the possibility of developing a complementary tool for these smart devices (smartphones or tablets). This tool would allow students in the first years of engineering and science degrees, who are studying Electronics subjects, to contrast the results of the analysis they conduct on different basic electrical circuits.To this end, a custom smartphone application was developed for devices based on Android operating system. The developed application allows a user to solve basic electrical circuits and find their distributions of voltages and currents. The application was designed to be particularly user friendly and easy-to-use, and it can obtain the values of these electrical magnitudes from a photograph of a circuit diagram that the student has previously drawn on a piece of paper. Therefore, it does not require any training and it allows a student to verify the analysis results of simple exercises directly at home, without the need to use any means other than their smartphone or tablet. This is especially interesting in cases where the student does not have any computer at home with sufficient resources to install a commercial circuit simulator.This application is aimed at undergraduate students in the first and second years, as the tool in its current state only solves circuits under stationary direct current (DC) conditions. However, students of higher grades have been involved in the development of the application code to make it more versatile based on their own experience as first year students.Although the application is in its early stages of development, it is already capable of solving basic circuits with voltage sources and different resistor associations. The development of the application is still in progress, so we expect to include in the next few months a greater complexity of the analysed circuits, as well as distribute the application among students attending basic electronics subjects to find out their degree of satisfaction with this tool.