2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Numerous lessons learned during the COVID-19 crisis have made educators rethink teaching practices that could be sustainable post the pandemic era. Offering hands-on engineering labs off-campus presented itself as a particular challenge during the emergency transition to remote learning. This necessitated innovative solutions to offer lab-based courses efficiently and conveniently to all students regardless of their location and status. We took advantage of advances in cloud computing and embarked on implementing a remote hardware laboratory for students, allowing them to experience a full-fledged remote experience without compromising what they could have accomplished if they were physically present in the lab. While the remote lab approach that we implemented seemed like a temporary solution suitable for the pandemic, the experience of teaching a digital design course using a remote Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) lab has shown the effectiveness of using such remote labs in offering similar or better learning outcomes compared to traditional in-person labs. The lessons learned from this experience during the pandemic have inspired this work that seeks to design and roll out a new generation of remote labs that offer new software tools, and an open access solution to costly hardware platforms that may not be obtainable by underserved communities, or by schools with limited resources. This project builds on the success of implementing a remotely accessible FPGA lab to expand the scope to include hardware that integrates FPGAs and Software-Defined Radios (SDR), together with new software enablers, to be used in interdisciplinary projects in electrical and computer engineering. The proposed toolkit can be replicated at other universities to provide access to industry grade hardware for underserved communities. While individual universities can use this open-source toolkit to create a remote lab for their own students, our sustainability plan also proposes a scalable solution that allows universities to connect their individual remote labs together to decrease costs on equipment purchases and to foster further collaboration between institutions by sharing both physical resources and pedagogical content.

In this poster, we present our approach in implementing an open-source remote laboratory for Software Defined Radio applications using ADALM Pluto. In this remote laboratory, students will use the software GNU Radio to allow students to design a complete flow from one device (ADALM Pluto) emitting a particular signal to another device (another ADALM Pluto) receiving that signal with a different, separate GNU Radio configured process. By adopting this technology, instructors of Software Defined Radio will be able to use real radio waves, even in a theory-based class, without having to deal with the devices and issues between the different devices in a single classroom. We believe that this approach will increase participation and provide a higher engagement by students (who can work 24/7 without having to have at home 2 expensive devices), which will lead to having a higher understanding of the subject.