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Board 382: RHLab RELIA: A Remote Integrated Environment forEmbedded Computing and RF Communication Systems

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Conference

2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Baltimore , Maryland

Publication Date

June 25, 2023

Start Date

June 25, 2023

End Date

June 28, 2023

Conference Session

NSF Grantees Poster Session

Tagged Topic

NSF Grantees Poster Session

Page Count

10

DOI

10.18260/1-2--43077

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/43077

Download Count

157

Paper Authors

biography

Brian Chap University of Washington Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-3705-3996

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Brian Chap is a Ph.D. student and research assistant of the Remote Hub Lab (RHLab) in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington. Brian's research spans remote engineering, computer vision, human-computer interaction, and image processing and sensing.

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biography

Marcos Jose Inonan Moran University of Washington

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Marcos Inonan is a PhD student and research assistant in the Remote Hub Lab (RHLab) of the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle. His research is centered on developing remote laboratories with a lens of equitable access to engineering education, and driven by his commitment to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in STEM education. In addition to his research on remote laboratories, Marcos has expertise in digital communication theory, signal processing, radar technology, and firmware engineering. Additionally, he has extensive experience in teaching embedded systems and senior design courses.

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Zhiyun Zhang University of Washington Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0009-0004-8323-8969

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Zhiyun Zhang is an undergraduate research assistant in the Remote Hub Lab at the University of Washington. He is a graduating senior and an incoming MS student with a focus area on embedded systems and remote engineering. Zhiyun is the recipient of the outstanding academic excellence award from the United States President's education awards program in 2019.

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Pablo Orduna LabsLand

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Payman Arabshahi University of Washington

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Rania Hussein University of Washington

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Dr. Rania Hussein is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Washington, where she also serves as the founder, principal investigator, and director of the Remote Hub Lab (RHLab). With her research focus on embedded systems, medical image analysis, digital twinning, and remote engineering, Dr. Hussein is committed to developing innovative solutions that enhance equity and access in engineering education and telehealth practices. Her work in promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education led to the successful building and passing of the religious accommodation law in the State of Washington, which provides alternative exam testing accommodations for students due to religious observances. Dr. Hussein is the recipient of the 2021 Innovative Program Award from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Head Association (ECEDHA), for founding the RHLab, as well as the 2022 IEEE Region 6 Outstanding Engineering Educator, Mentor, and Facilitator in the Area of STEM Award, recognizing her contributions to advancing students' success, mentorship, empowering under-represented communities, and promoting equitable access to engineering education.

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Abstract

Numerous lessons learned during the COVID-19 crisis have made educators rethink teaching practices that could be sustainable post the pandemic era. Offering hands-on engineering labs off-campus presented itself as a particular challenge during the emergency transition to remote learning. This necessitated innovative solutions to offer lab-based courses efficiently and conveniently to all students regardless of their location and status. We took advantage of advances in cloud computing and embarked on implementing a remote hardware laboratory for students, allowing them to experience a full-fledged remote experience without compromising what they could have accomplished if they were physically present in the lab. While the remote lab approach that we implemented seemed like a temporary solution suitable for the pandemic, the experience of teaching a digital design course using a remote Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) lab has shown the effectiveness of using such remote labs in offering similar or better learning outcomes compared to traditional in-person labs. The lessons learned from this experience during the pandemic have inspired this work that seeks to design and roll out a new generation of remote labs that offer new software tools, and an open access solution to costly hardware platforms that may not be obtainable by underserved communities, or by schools with limited resources. This project builds on the success of implementing a remotely accessible FPGA lab to expand the scope to include hardware that integrates FPGAs and Software-Defined Radios (SDR), together with new software enablers, to be used in interdisciplinary projects in electrical and computer engineering. The proposed toolkit can be replicated at other universities to provide access to industry grade hardware for underserved communities. While individual universities can use this open-source toolkit to create a remote lab for their own students, our sustainability plan also proposes a scalable solution that allows universities to connect their individual remote labs together to decrease costs on equipment purchases and to foster further collaboration between institutions by sharing both physical resources and pedagogical content.

In this poster, we present our approach in implementing an open-source remote laboratory for Software Defined Radio applications using ADALM Pluto. In this remote laboratory, students will use the software GNU Radio to allow students to design a complete flow from one device (ADALM Pluto) emitting a particular signal to another device (another ADALM Pluto) receiving that signal with a different, separate GNU Radio configured process. By adopting this technology, instructors of Software Defined Radio will be able to use real radio waves, even in a theory-based class, without having to deal with the devices and issues between the different devices in a single classroom. We believe that this approach will increase participation and provide a higher engagement by students (who can work 24/7 without having to have at home 2 expensive devices), which will lead to having a higher understanding of the subject.

Chap, B., & Inonan Moran, M. J., & Zhang, Z., & Orduna, P., & Arabshahi, P., & Hussein, R. (2023, June), Board 382: RHLab RELIA: A Remote Integrated Environment forEmbedded Computing and RF Communication Systems Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--43077

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2023 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015