RemEduLa - Remote Education Laboratory for FPGA Design Technology

Christopher Blochwitz, Philipp Grothe, Sven Dreier, Waiel Aljnabi, Rainer Buchty, Mladen Berekovic

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.