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Most embedded systems design efforts in industry have moved to modern 32-bit devices with networking capabilities. The widespread development of such embedded applications has led to the highly influential concept of the "Internet of Things (IoT)". This paper describes our ongoing work of introducing the IoT technologies in an embedded networking course. We mainly present our experience of applying the TM4C1294 Connected Launchpad with two BoosterPacksSensor Hub and SimpleLink WiFi provided by Texas Instruments (TI) to the development of course projects. The Launchpad includes a 32-bit ARM Cortex M4 microcontroller (MCU) integrated with 10/100 Ethernet MAC and PHY. TI's Code Composer Studio (CCS) -an Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and some open source software like the lightweight TCP/IP stack called IwIP are used for software development. In this course, we introduce students the TCP/IP protocols, and wireless communication technologies like WiFi and Bluetooth. Through course projects, students study the implementation of TCP/IP protocols in practice, and learn how to use drivers of Ethernet port and WiFi connection to develop microcontroller-based networking applications. Our primary experiences indicate that TI's connected Launchpad with various BoosterPack plugin-in modules is a flexible, cost-effective, well-supported platform for teaching embedded networking and developing IoT applications.

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The BeagleBone Black (BBB) board is a low cost, open hardware and expandable computer launched by a community of developers sponsored by Texas Instruments. The size of the board is small enough to fit in a mint tin box. It can be used for a variety of projects from high school fair projects to prototypes of very complex real-world embedded systems. This paper presents our work of employing the BBB board in designing embedded systems, and compares it with Raspberry Pi and Arduino in educating engineering and technology students. Our primary experience demonstrates that this board is an easy-to-use and cost-effective kit which can be employed by college-level students for designing their capstone projects.

This paper presents our experiences of teaching the course "Real-time Embedded Systems Design" by applying the free and open source Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) called FreeRTOS. The emphasis is placed on how we adopted FreeRTOS as a real-world RTOS example in both lectures and lab sessions from exercises preparation, lab equipment setup to lab organization. Compared with existing real-time computing courses, the main difference of this course is that we focus on teaching students the design and application development of real-time embedded systems from the practitioner's point of view, instead of introducing research or theoretical topics. FreeRTOS is a real-time kernel/scheduler designed to run on a microcontroller for embedded applications. It supports a large number of underlying microcontroller architectures and has become the leading real-time computing platform for microcontrollers. In this course, it has been applied to conducting experiments with multitask scheduling algorithms and the real-time interfacing with microcontrollers for all our lab sessions and course projects. Our primary experiences indicate that FreeRTOS is a richly featured, cost-efficient and well supported RTOS for teaching real-time systems design and developing microcontroller-based real-time applications.