RHL-Butterfly: A Scalable IoT-Based Breadboard Platform for Embedded Systems and Remote Laboratories

Abstract

The RHL-Butterfly is a research to practice virtualized breadboard solution for FPGAs and ARM microcontrollers in remote laboratories and engineering education curriculum. The COVID-19 pandemic brought challenges to traditional engineering education practices, particularly with hardware, hands-on engineering practices without compromising creativity and instruction. The RHL-Butterfly aims to address traditional engineering education shortcomings and provide equitable access for all students interested in the engineering curriculum. This work improves upon an existing virtual breadboard model by using virtualization to interface a virtual breadboard with physical, remote hardware from a website user interface and presents a solution to support FPGAs and ARM microcontrollers and supporting intermediate logic gate integrated circuits. The new iteration of the virtualized breadboard uses a custom protocol that converts the graphically represented breadboard layout into a 1D string representation for network communication. The 1D string representation is then parsed in a custom designed, open-source, and scalable breadboard parser for embedded systems. This balance between a virtualized interface and physical hardware implementation preserves a hardware curriculum embedded systems engineering education and brings a promising solution to expand the scalability and accessibility of engineering labs.