Fpga-based remote laboratory for digital electronics
International Journal of Development Research
Fpga-based remote laboratory for digital electronics
Received 10th January, 2021; Received in revised form 06th February, 2021; Accepted 17th March, 2021; Published online 13th April, 2021
Copyright © 2021, Leonardo Mesquita et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This paper presents a proposal of a remote laboratory based on FPGA - Field Programmable Gate Array for use as an instrument to support the practical activities related to the discipline of Digital Electronics in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science courses. The proposed remote lab is based on Altera's DE0 Development and Education Board (kit DE0), on a server that is connected to the internet through the University's internal network and IP camera. Users will be able to evaluate experiment results through video streaming from the use of IP cameras. With the use of the TeamViewer tool, students will be able to remotely access the server and perform the predictable activities or use the platform to test their own projects. One of the advantages of our proposal is that the user does not need to learn to use a new software tool in order to perform the communication between the server and the kit DE0. In addition, since the entire process of configuring and updating the application is based on the quartus_stp package, we do not need additional hardware, based on microcontroller or microprocessor, to send real-time data to the FPGA. We will also present a methodology proposal so that the remote platform can be effectively used as an educational tool. In the proposed environment, the student or teacher has at his disposal a hierarchy of archives containing the pedagogical resources necessary for the adoption of didactic practices based on the principles of active learning methodologies.