Teaching the Internet of Things (IoT) Using Universally Available Raspberry Pi and Arduino Platforms

Abstract

Chair, presently teaches in the Electronics Group at Springfield Technical Community College (STCC) located in Springfield, MA. A long time faculty member and consultant to local business and industry, Mullett has provided leadership and initiated numerous curriculum reforms as either the Chair or Co-Department Chair of the four technology degree programs that constitute the Electronics Group. Since the mid-1990s, he has been active in the NSF's ATE and CCLI programs as a knowledge leader in the wireless telecommunications field. A co-founder of the long running National Center for Telecommunications Technologies (then the ICT Center) located at STCC, Mullett also played a principle role in the development of the innovative and long running Verizon NextStep employee training program. The author of two text books, Basic Telecommunications -The Physical Layer and Wireless Telecommunications Systems and Networks, Mullett did both his undergraduate and graduate work (in Remote Sensing) in the ECE Department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where he also taught the undergraduate sequence of courses in electromagnetics. He has presented at numerous local, regional, and national conferences and also internationally on telecommunications and wireless topics and on the status of the education of electronics technicians at the two-year college level. His current interests are: the development of novel and innovative systemslevel approaches to the education of technicians, applications of the emerging field of wired and wireless networked embedded controllers and sensor/actuator networks, and cyber-physical system applications in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT).c American Society for Engineering Education, 2016 Teaching the Internet of Things (IoT) using universally available Raspberry Pi and Arduino platforms Abstract Major technology corporations like IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and others have taken direct aim at the rapidly developing Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. These corporations believe that the next major technologic evolution (and hence their future markets and customers) will revolve around this newest application of the Internet. These companies and most involved in the technology fields believe that we are on the cusp of the next transformation of machinery and infrastructure: the process of adding intelligence and connectivity to small to large-scale technology and infrastructure systems and in this process creating the Internet of Things. Already, academic and industry experts in various technical fields have given catchy names to these proposed systems: autonomous cars, Smart Grid, Smart Buildings, Smart Homes, e-health care, are but a few terms that have made it into the popular press. These large-scale and not-solarge-scale applications are becoming possible due to the convergence of several key enabling technologies. Essentially, through the use of networked embedded controllers (known as ambient intelligence) and complex wired and wireless sensor and actuator n...

A Review of Embedded Systems Education in the Arduino Age: Lessons Learned and Future Directions

“…Interfacing Arudino with MATLAB [19][20], LabView [21][22][23], and its use in the IoT domain [24][25][26] paves the way for unlimited possibilities of multidisciplinary applications.…”

A Multidisciplinary Pilot Course on the Internet of Things: Curriculum Development Using Lean Startup Principles

“…Mullett described an Internet of Everything course which addresses microprocessors, microcontrollers, hardware theory, software programming, operating systems and interfacing hardware and controllers to the real world 23 . This course was taught with the Arduino Uno microcontroller for interfacing to the sensors and the Raspberry Pi 2 microprocessor for web interface.…”

Infusing Raspberry Pi in the Computer Science Curriculum for Enhanced Learning

“…It takes significant amount of time to develop tutorials and vet them before using them in the targeted courses. This is irrespective of existing resources available for using RPi in an academic setting [15][16][17]. A useful approach found in the process of rolling out RPi, is to have a few Teaching Assistants (TAs) dedicated to test the developed tutorials, and to help improve upon the tutorials for next iteration.…”