RHL-Butterfly: A Scalable IoT-Based Breadboard Prototype for Embedded Systems Laboratories
RHL-Butterfly: A Scalable IoT-Based Breadboard Prototype for Embedded Systems Laboratories
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RHL-Butterfly：适用于嵌入式系统实验室的可扩展的基于物联网的面包板原型
DOI：
10.1109/fie56618.2022.9962495
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发表时间：
2022
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
P. Orduña
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Matthew Guo;Rania Hussein;P. Orduña
这篇从研究到实践的工作进展论文介绍了一种适用于远程实验室中FPGA和ARM微控制器的虚拟化试验板解决方案。COVID-19疫情期间出现的情况表明，当前工程教育实践存在脆弱性，特别是在处理硬件资源方面。以紧急在线教学为中心对提供动手工程实验室的传统做法提出了挑战，这就需要一种解决方案来处理硬件原型设计，而不影响创造力和教学。嵌入式系统学习体验的一个重要方面是确保学生和教职员工都有机会学习和构建与面包板上的微处理器交互的定制原型电路。在本文中，我们建立在我们的小组使用虚拟化通过Web应用程序将虚拟试验板与物理硬件接口的先前工作的基础上。我们以前的工作仅限于与一种特定的硬件接口，旨在探索与硬件I/O引脚接口的基本传感器和执行器的功能。然而，在硬件工程实践中，设计者不受单个微处理器选择的限制来控制他们的系统和设计，并且不受提供外部电路功能的换能器和致动器的类型的限制。本文提出了一种解决方案，通过扩展现有的虚拟试验板的研究，以支持FPGA和ARM微控制器和中间逻辑门集成电路的实际使用，在工程模拟器。提供更多的支持硬件选择有助于促进学生的学习，并模拟工业环境中的硬件开发。由于FPGA和ARM微控制器在工业和教育领域的日益普及，我们预计我们的解决方案将通过更广泛的支持硬件选择为更多的受众提供服务。我们的解决方案通过采用用户原型输入和输出并直接将周围系统的功能编程到物理硬件，在不牺牲实时嵌入式系统性质的情况下虚拟化了试验板原型设计体验。虚拟化接口和物理硬件实现之间的这种平衡保留了硬件课程嵌入式系统工程教育，并带来了一个有前途的解决方案，以扩大工程实验室的可扩展性和可访问性。
This Research to Practice Work-In-Progress paper presents a virtualized breadboard solution for FPGAs and ARM microcontrollers in remote laboratories. The circumstances that rose amidst the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the vulnerability of current engineering education practices, particularly in dealing with hardware resources. Pivoting to the emergency online instruction presented challenges to the traditional practices in delivering hands-on engineering labs, which necessitated a solution that handles hardware prototyping without compromising creativity and instruction. One vital aspect of the embedded systems learning experience is ensuring students and faculty members alike have opportunities to learn and build custom prototyping circuits that interact with microprocessors on breadboards. In this paper, we build on the prior work that our group implemented on using virtualization to interface a virtual breadboard with physical hardware through web applications. Our previous work was limited to interfacing with one particular kind of hardware, designed to explore the capabilities of fundamental transducers and actuators that interface with hardware I/O pins. In hardware engineering practice, however, designers are not constrained by a single microprocessor selection to control their system and designs and are not limited by the type of transducers and actuators that provide the external circuit functionality. This paper presents a solution by scaling the existing virtual breadboard research to support FPGAs and ARM microcontrollers and intermediate logic gate integrated circuits for practical use in engineering curriculums. Providing this increased selection of supporting hardware helps facilitate student learning and simulates hardware development in an industrial setting. Due to the rising popularity of FPGAs and ARM microcontrollers in industry and in education, we expect that our solution will serve a larger audience through this broader selection of supported hardware. Our solution virtualizes the breadboard prototyping experience without sacrificing the nature of real-time embedded systems by taking the user prototyped inputs and outputs and directly programming the functionality of the surrounding system to physical hardware. This balance between a virtualized interface and physical hardware implementation preserves a hardware curriculum embedded systems engineering education and brings a promising solution to expand the scalability and accessibility of engineering labs.