Connected Learning: How Sangari Apparatus Delivers Live Data to Every Student

A practical engineering laboratory session typically groups anywhere from ten to thirty students around a single piece of apparatus. The physical experiment is happening in one place: a heat exchanger on a workbench, a vibrating beam bolted to an aluminium frame, a pump system in the corner of the room. The challenge has always been the same — how does every student get a clear, meaningful view of what the apparatus is measuring in real time?

The traditional answer was a single PC connected by USB to the apparatus, running proprietary software, with students taking turns at the keyboard. For remote learning it offered no answer at all. Sangari equipment takes a fundamentally different approach: the apparatus itself is a networked server, and every student's browser is a client.

The apparatus is a server

At the core of Sangari's networked equipment sits an embedded controller — not just a data acquisition card, but a dedicated computer with its own processing, storage, and network stack. The embedded controller continuously reads sensors, runs safety interlocks, logs values to local memory, and simultaneously serves a browser-based user interface to anyone connected on the same network.

There is no separate PC in this architecture. The touch-screen display on the apparatus front panel is simply one client of the same interface that students see in their browsers. Every measurement, every chart, every control element is rendered by a web application served directly from within the apparatus enclosure.

This matters for a simple but important reason: any device with a browser can be a workstation. Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS — all irrelevant. No software installation, no driver configuration, no licence key entry. A student opens a browser, navigates to the apparatus's local address, and is immediately looking at live sensor data.

Two network topologies

Sangari apparatus supports two distinct operating modes, switchable at installation time depending on how the laboratory infrastructure is organised.

Standalone access point mode

In this mode the apparatus broadcasts its own WiFi network — it becomes the router. Students see the apparatus's SSID in their device's WiFi list (something like TH550-Lab3), connect to it, and open a browser to a fixed local IP address. The apparatus serves the interface directly. There is no dependency on the building's network infrastructure whatsoever: no IT involvement, no VLAN assignment, no firewall exceptions. If the experiment room has no internet connection at all, this mode still works perfectly for in-lab sessions.

This topology is particularly useful for mobile setups and demonstration contexts, or for laboratories where students bring their own devices and there is no institutional WiFi to rely on.

Infrastructure mode

Here the apparatus connects to the lab's existing router as a standard WiFi or LAN client. Students are already on the campus network via their own laptops or the lab's workstations, and they reach the apparatus at its IP address or via a local hostname published by the lab's DHCP server.

Infrastructure mode is the preferred choice in larger facilities where several apparatus are running simultaneously and the IT team wants them centrally reachable. Critically, it also gives the apparatus outbound internet access — which is required for the remote relay described below.

Unlimited concurrent viewers

Because the user interface is a web application, the apparatus essentially operates as an HTTP server. There is no concept of "one user logged in at a time." Every student in the room can open the same address in their own browser and see the identical live data stream independently — each with their own ability to zoom charts, toggle sensor channels, and export recorded data to a spreadsheet.

This is not just a convenience feature; it changes the pedagogy of the session. The demonstrator can walk through the experiment on the touch-screen while every student simultaneously follows on their own laptop. Students at the back of the room are no longer disadvantaged. Students who missed a portion of the session can revisit the logged data at the end without relying on someone else's notes.

One software licence supports unlimited simultaneous LAN/WLAN observer workstations — the entire cohort, one apparatus, no per-seat cost.

Remote access via Sangari Servers

The most technically interesting part of the architecture is how students outside the building reach the apparatus. The naive approach — opening a port on the lab's firewall and giving students a public IP address — is almost never feasible in a university environment. IT departments rightly refuse it, and even where possible it creates security exposure.

Sangari's solution avoids the problem entirely by inverting the direction of the initial connection. When a session starts, the apparatus does not wait to be found from the outside. Instead, it opens an outbound connection to Sangari's servers — a persistent, authenticated tunnel over HTTPS and WebSocket. Because it is an outbound connection, it travels through NAT and institutional firewalls without requiring any special configuration. The server holds this tunnel open.

A remote student navigates to the Sangari Connected Learning platform, logs in, and opens the session for their lab group. The platform routes their browser connection through the server relay to the apparatus in the lab. From the student's perspective they are simply viewing a web page; from the network's perspective the data is flowing from apparatus → outbound tunnel → Sangari Servers → remote browser.

This pattern — sometimes called a reverse proxy tunnel or cloud relay — is the same principle used by remote desktop services and IoT device management platforms. Its key advantage is that the apparatus needs no public IP address and the lab IT team configures nothing beyond ordinary outbound HTTPS access, which is open by default on virtually every institutional network.

What remote students can do

Remote access does not mean read-only. Students connecting from home have full access to the live sensor data stream, all chart controls, and the ability to log and export measurements for their own analysis. They can interact with the experiment's software interface — adjusting what data is displayed, annotating readings, running through guided procedures — in the same way as a student sitting in the room.

The distinction comes at the level of physical setpoints. Changing the heater power on a thermal apparatus, opening a valve, or altering a pump speed involves writing a command that will cause hardware in the laboratory to act. These operations require confirmation from within the lab — whether from the demonstrator or a student physically present. This is both a safety requirement (an unmanned laboratory should not have remotely triggered hardware changes) and a deliberate pedagogical boundary: the physical act of operating the apparatus remains a hands-on experience.

In practice this means a hybrid session model works well: a demonstrator or small group in the lab sets up and runs the experiment, while a larger remote cohort observes, records, and analyses the results in real time alongside them.

The Sangari Connected Learning layer

Running in parallel with the live apparatus connection is the Sangari Connected Learning platform — a structured e-learning environment built specifically around the equipment. Where the apparatus connection provides the live data, Connected Learning provides the instructional scaffolding: theory primers, guided procedure steps, worked examples, and post-lab exercises.

Both layers are accessible from the same browser session. A student can read the background theory on heat exchanger effectiveness, watch a short explainer, then switch tabs to the live apparatus view, conduct the measurements, and return to submit their calculated results — all within a single platform, on any device, from any location.

This integration is not incidental. The whole point is to dissolve the boundary between "lab session" and "studying" — making experimental data available at any time for revisiting, and making theoretical resources available at the bench without needing a separate textbook.

How this compares to USB-only systems

For context: the conventional approach in laboratory equipment is a USB cable from the apparatus to one dedicated Windows PC running proprietary data acquisition software. That PC is the only workstation with access to the experiment. Every student who wants to interact must queue for that seat; remote access requires a separate, complex VPN setup that most institutions do not support; and replacing the PC means reinstalling and relicensing the software.

The Sangari architecture turns this inside out. The apparatus is the computer; the network is the medium; the browser is the client. There is no installation step, no single point of contention, and no platform dependency.

Summary

The networking stack inside a Sangari apparatus can be summarised in four layers:

• Acquisition layer — sensors feed real-time data to the embedded controller, which stores it locally and exposes it via an internal API
• Local serving layer — the embedded controller's web server pushes the browser UI and live data to any device on the same network, in either standalone-AP or infrastructure mode
• Remote relay layer — an outbound tunnel to Sangari Servers makes the apparatus reachable from outside the building without firewall changes, enabling partial remote interaction
• Platform layer — Sangari Connected Learning wraps the live data connection in structured instructional content, accessible from the same browser on any device

The result is equipment that scales naturally from one student at the bench to an entire cohort in the room — and from there to students learning from home — without any change to the apparatus itself and without any dependency on the institution's IT infrastructure beyond ordinary internet access.

Interested in how this looks for a specific experiment? Browse our product range or speak with our team about equipping your laboratory.