No abstract

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

In practice, software is often deployed with several hidden bugs despite various test processes and static analyses. Such bugs often cause a phenomenon called software aging that refers to the accumulation of errors occurring in long running software systems that results in a decrease of performance and an increases of the probability to crash the entire system. This paper presents a mechanism to detect memory leaks in embedded systems software at runtime that can be used to counter software aging. In particular, it presents and compares two measurement based algorithms to identify memory leaks on Embedded Linux devices at runtime. Both algorithms have been implemented and evaluated using an industrial room controller targeting building automation. Based on this approach we were able to identify an existing memory leak we were unaware of beforehand.

No abstract

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.