TEACH: Transferable RTOS Education with Accessible MicroController Hardware

Abstract

Comprehensive real-world environments for fundamental teaching of real-time operating-systems concepts are challenging to find, meeting the requirement of sufficient simplicity for allowing a focus on the relevant curricular concepts. Especially when it comes to implementations on real systems, a full-featured, yet simple to use platform is usually lacking. Despite the pure execution of a real-time operating-system, such a platform has to include proper I/O, such as a display, GPIO pins and buttons, and communication standards in order to deploy realistic workloads. Additionally, making the target platform accessible, including setting up the tool chain, installing device drivers and connecting the system can impose a further challenge. In this demo, we present an easily deployable RTOS teaching platform, namely TEACH, which is proven to work in three international teaching collaboration formats within Germany, the United States and the Netherlands. This platform consists of ESP32-based systems, namely the SQFMI Watchy and the ESP32-S3-DevKitC, which comprises the required I/O functionality and an accessible port of FreeRTOS. We equip these systems with software libraries to make the I/O functionality usable without steep learning curves and support dev containers and readily deployed remote access setups in order to minimize setup overheads. In combination with a collection of teaching assignments dedicated to this platform, we enable low overhead teaching for real-time operating-systems, which allows a focus on the fundamental concepts, escaping infrastructural overheads.

Publication
Open Demo Session of Real-Time Systems