Remote Arduino Labs for Teaching Microcontrollers and Internet of Things Programming

Remote labs provide students with the capability for mobile learning and allow them to be practiced and experimented over specialized equipment and tools, from any place, for acquiring practical skills and fulfilling assignments of the courses they follow. Without the provision of such facilities, distant courses focusing on the training of students to use and program specific hardware equipment or licensed software cannot be offered. In this paper we wish to present the remote labs we offered to students of electrical and computer engineering for their remote practicing to microcontrollers and Internet of Things programming. The Labs are based on Arduinos and exploit the capabilities of Arduino CLI. The latter is used as the toolkit to implement an always-on web service that accepts Arduino sketches, compiles, and sends them to the Arduino Labs for execution. A web camera, streaming via the web page a panoramic view of each lab, enables the illustration of the outcome to the students, so they can have live feedback for the results of their programming. The Labs are complemented by a web-based booking system for scheduling access to them. Finally, appropriate course material and exercises have been prepared for the training of students over the Labs. The remote Arduino Labs are implemented in the context of SYS-STEM, a two-year EU funded Erasmus+ KA2 project that aims to fill the gap of educational systems for training students remotely over open laboratorial platforms. This paper describes the rationale, aims and objectives of the project and presents the produced course material and its deployment in project partners' pilot installations.