RemEduLa - Remote Education Laboratory for FPGA Design Technology
Christopher Blochwitz, Philipp Grothe, Sven Dreier, Waiel Aljnabi, Rainer Buchty, Mladen Bereković
Abstract
Teaching hardware design is both challenging for teachers and students as it typically requires direct access to the targeted hardware platform for final testing. In this paper, we introduce RemEduLa - Remote Educational Laboratory for FPGA design technology. The core idea is to provide students with a developing experience as close as possible to presence teaching as part of lab courses. Therefore, the physical FPGA board is connected to a hardware server enabling the virtual instrumentation via a web interface. An overlay design with virtual inputs and outputs serves as a gateway, offering the student full control over their FPGA development board. This includes peripherals such as buttons, LEDs, and external components (sensors, actuators) as well as real-time visual feedback via a video stream. This one-to-one mapping of real hardware and students allows for the reuse of exercises formerly conducted in the on-site lab time.