Increasing the accessibility of measurement equipment for undergraduate courses dedicated to embedded systems

Embedded systems courses and labs teaching hardware and software design are a necessity in many technical university programs. Within these courses, students need to perform signal measurements on real hardware utilizing expensive and professional equipment. This implies that it would be advantageous for all students (full-time, part-time & distance learning) having access to the real hardware and the necessary equipment. Due to OPES (One Platform for Every Student) it is ensured that students are equipped with embedded platforms. In order to develop their skills at home, proper measurement equipment is mandatory. Therefore, the tools to complete the exercises and assignments need to be available 24/7 to all students. To address this need of access to measurement equipment outside the university, a suitable toolkit is necessary. This toolkit should be affordable for the university to increase the availability of measurement equipment for every student. Furthermore, it should provide adequate functions and features to ease the successful completion of exercises and assignments. Finally, the toolkit should be scalable to ensure the integration of further functions and features. The hardware and software design should be available to the open-source community as well. This paper describes the development of a low-cost, open-source oscilloscope which has the potential to solve these problems and closes the lack of access. Hence, this paper gives an overview of the oscilloscope architecture, the signal processing unit, and the graphical user interface.