The Design and Implementation of Embedded
Online Laboratory
Qingguo Zhou
1
, Yulong Zhang
1
, Hongyu Sun
1
, Ting Wu
1
, Minqiang Yang
1
, Rui Zhou
1*
, Wenkuang Chou
3
,
Kuan-Ching Li
2
1. School of Information Science and Engineering, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China
2. Dept. of Computer Science and Information Engr., Providence University, Taichung, Taiwan
3. Dept. of Computer Science and Information Management , Providence University, Taichung, Taiwan
* E-mail: zr@lzu.edu.cn
Abstract—Remote development has now been widely applied to
embedded systems and interactive product development, and it has
the advantages of high efficiency, real-time collaborative. The
embedded online laboratory provides a complete set of equipment to
achieve the development of online and teaching platform with
integrated, personalized, open and convenient operation. The
platform integrated development environment includes all tools for
software development, as well as the remote operation interface
such as console access, power management, code downloading,
video monitoring and system restore. The paper proposes an online
embedded system laboratory platform that aims to improve software
development efficiency, equipment sharing, information exchange
and telecommuting which all combined are likely to reduce
development and learning cycle.
Keywords—Embedded development; Remote platform; Real-
time control; Online learning
I. INTRODUCTION
With the development of information technology, people
are placing more importance on the flexibility of design and
on the digital working mode. Intelligent development is a
technical evolution about the development from the embedded
systems to cyber physical systems. Thus, it would achieve the
integrated design of computing, communications and physical
systems so as to make the system more reliable, more efficient
and more real-time collaboration and to have an important and
extensive application prospect [1].
To get knowledge and skill of engineering mainly depends
on practice and experiment, and pays more attention to
cultivate the students’ comprehensive ability to apply
hardware and software [2]. It is necessary that we build the
development and teaching environment of embedded systems
in the premise of hardware and software. Environment
includes not only typical embedded development board, such
as ARM, X86 and MIPS, etc., but a variety of other devices,
like personal computers, cameras, relays, oscilloscopes and
signal generators, etc., as well as the necessary software
configuration. It is crucial, therefore, that how to effectively
manage and maintain the equipment in order to guarantee the
quality of teaching [3].
In the traditional embedded systems teaching laboratory,
the students can come into contact with different architectural
development board, and directly connect to the board to
develop, but they would be limited by time and place when
using the device, and the laboratory equipment is idle in the
absence of the course [4,5], in addition the complex
surroundings do not facilitate the administration and
maintenance of equipment. In view of these drawbacks, we
have established a remote laboratory for embedded study and
system development.
The embedded online laboratory is a lab that users have
access to the physical position located remote through
network, and it could realize the capability of remote access of
the equipment via a variety of control systems and software
tools. The remote laboratory has strong laboratory equipment
to provide users with real-time, actually the processes carried
out and experiment data [6,7]. The remote laboratory
mentioned in the paper generally refers to access remote
physical experimental facilities over the Internet. It has earlier
been very widely used in the control field, afterwards, in other
subject teaching step by step.
II.
EMBEDDED ONLINE LABORATORY DESIGN
• Design Ideas
TABLE 1. EMBEDDED DEVELOPMENT PLATFORM COMPARISON
The remote laboratory operates the laboratory equipment
over the network so as to achieve the purpose of the remote
experiment. To build remote labs is to make better use of
laboratory equipment, so that students can have more time for
hands-on learning, and it is propitious for management and
maintenance of equipment [8]. We analyzed the existing
development environment and compared to them, as shown in
table 1. Some specific hardware platform will provide an
integrated development environment㧔IDE㧕, which allows
users to easily develop, but does not support remote operation,
Development
platform
System
Development
Debug
ging
Remote
Access
Teaching
System
Specific hardware
platform IDE
h h
Chip company’s
SDK
h h h
Open Source IDE
(Buildroot, etc.)
h h h
Internal
development tools
h
h
Embedded Online
Laboratory
2015 44th International Conference on Parallel Processing Workshops
1530-2016/15 $31.00 © 2015 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/.45
88
2015 44th International Conference on Parallel Processing Workshops
1530-2016/15 $31.00 © 2015 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/.45
86
2015 44th International Conference on Parallel Processing Workshops
1530-2016/15 $31.00 © 2015 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICPPW.2015.45
86