FPGA Remote Laboratory Using IoT Approaches

Abstract

Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are relatively high-end devices that are not easily shared between multiple users. In this work, we achieved a remotely accessible FPGA framework using accessible Internet of Things (IoT) approaches. We sought to develop a method for students to receive the same level of educational quality in a remote environment that they would receive in a typical, in-person course structure for a university-level digital design course. Keeping cost in mind, we are able to combine the functionality of an entry-level FPGA and a Raspberry Pi Zero to provide IoT access for laboratory work. Previous works in this field allow only one user to access an FPGA at a time, which requires students to schedule time slots. Our design is unique in that it gives multiple users the ability to interact simultaneously with one individual top-level design on an FPGA. This novel design has the benefit for classroom presentations, collaboration and debugging, and eliminates the need for restricting student access to a time slot for FPGA access. Further, our hardware wrapper is lightweight, utilizing less than 1% of tested FPGA chips, allowing it to be integrated with resource-heavy designs. The application is meant to scale with large designs; there is no difference between how many users can interact with the remote design, regardless of the complexity of the design. Further, the number of users who can interact with a single project is limited only by the bandwidth restrictions imposed by Google Fire Base, which is far beyond any practical number of users for simultaneous access.

MEIoT 2D-CACSET: IoT Two-Dimensional Cartesian Coordinate System Educational Toolkit Align with Educational Mechatronics Framework

“…This is thanks to the developed motion algorithm, which uses the data collected by the following sensors: gyroscope, encoders, and UWB sensor, to generate kinematic movements according to a reference position. Moreover, in [22], the latency analysis is performed for an IoT remote FPGA laboratory; it is critical to have low latency in FPGA's real-time processing so that the data are not misinterpreted. Results show a latency of 0.192 s; for this work, the latency obtained in [22] for the functionality of the MEIoT 2D-CACSET system is taken as a reference, assuming that this is a system with slow dynamics, which uses the Raspberry Pi as an intermediary between the instructions provided from the GUI and the EV3 robot and that it can have a latency time no greater than 0.2 s, considering the maximum response time of the server.…”

“…It is worth mentioning that since 2D-CACSET is an instructional face-to-face learning tool, papers that provide IoT capabilities to non-internet-capable devices or develop remote laboratories oriented to teach specific subjects are of interest to our purpose. A case in point is [22], where an IoT field programmable gate array (FPGA) remote laboratory is presented and oriented to a university-level digital design course; authors employ single board computers (SBC) to provide IoT capabilities to FPGA. The laboratory involves a mobile application and two FPGA-based development boards.…”

Internet-of-Things Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Assessment for STEM Education: A Review of Literature

“…Students can remotely conduct experiments through these laboratories while not being present at the same physical location as the laboratory setup. The recent COVID pandemic underscores the need for the development of such remote laboratories so that students can continue to receive hands-on practical training without compromising their educational experience [131]. A small number of IoT educational practitioners have identified this need and have developed remote laboratories for IoT education [132]- [135].…”

Remote field-programmable gate array laboratory for signal acquisition and design verification

“…Previous studies have proposed and implemented remote FPGA laboratories [10]- [13], [15]- [23] with mixed success. The desirability and acceptability criteria of the remote laboratory design are placed on low resource utilization on the FPGA boards, the ability of remote users to debug the program conveniently, the ability of users to acquire a large amount of FPGA board's data, and a simple user interface.…”