Embedded systems courses and labs teaching hardware and software design are a necessity in many technical university programs. The attendees of these courses train their skills and expertise on hardware platforms available for the students only during the phase of attendance. To gain practical skills in building such systems, lab courses are required and appropriate parts have to be supplied.To train the same skills and expertise in distance learning courses, a new approach is necessary, as everything has to be supplied to the students "at home". Apart from detailed handson tutorials and teaching materials, a hardware platform for every student is mandatory. To keep the motivation for the subject high, a start at Operating System level (nowadays well known to all the students) and gradual decent to bit-level and the attachment of external hardware to a microcontroller, is the introduced approach. This is standing in opposition to common concepts that start at pin-level and progress up to Operating System level.To train practical skills in assembling an embedded system a HW/SW co -simulation tool comes in handy. The students can prepare and test a self designed electronic completely in the simulation environment and hands-on skills with real components can be gained quickly in a very short attendance phase.The concepts and recommended tools for such a distance learning course are described in this paper
The common approach teaching Embedded Systems Engineering is "Bottom-up", which introduces the "Embedded World" to the students at bit level abstraction. The analysis of students-feedback showed that this approach has demotivating effects as there is a quite big entrance hurdle. The alternative approach is to start at Operating System level and gradually migrate to direct hardware access. The students are already familiar with Operating Systems, since they use them every day and the curriculum prematurely provides them with knowledge about it. This means starting to teach Embedded Systems Engineering at Operating System level picks up the students at an already existing base of knowledge and guides them to the basics of Embedded Systems Engineering.
According to labor market needs even fresh graduates from undergraduate programs have to have not only profound knowledge but also extensive practical experiences especially when it comes to software design for Embedded Computing Systems. Didactic approaches like problem-based learning and project-based learning with a high degree of hands-on training using state of the art hardware, software, and tools have proven to achieve this learning outcome. Even though hands-on training using industry relevant equipment works fine with full-time students, the desired practical skills have to be obtained in a different way with part-time or distance-learning students. This is because of the significantly reduced training hours at dedicated university labs. This paper focuses primarily on a concrete setup and mix of dedicated learning infrastructures (“Remote-Lab” and “Hardware/Software Co-Simulation”) suitable for courses dealing with Embedded Systems (Software) Design to support students, participating in part-time or distance-learning degree programs, in developing their required skills.
In courses dedicated to embedded systems software students train their skills and expertise using embedded hardware and the required development tools. In order to gain sustainable knowledge in embedded systems engineering it would be an asset, if the development tools and the hardware are available 24/7 to every student. This implies that the embedded platform and the desired development equipment -e.g. integrated development environment (IDE) and its licenses as well as the debug interface, etc. -have to be supplied by the university. One component in the development toolchain -the debug interface unit -is the target of optimization described in this paper. By not only trying to reduce the costs but also increasing the versatility, the effectiveness of the toolchain is improved.The implementation of such a debugger, the performance tests and the composition of the recommended development tools are described in this paper.
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