RHL-Butterfly: A Scalable IoT-Based Breadboard Prototype for Embedded Systems Laboratories

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.