Abstract
A nomadic laboratory or testbed, based on Raspberry Pi 3 computers and Arduino microcontrollers, has been developed in order to teach subjects related to computer architecture. The testbed can be transported to the classroom. Students can access it through the available network, which can be a wireless LAN, wired LAN o a custom network. Students can access without constraints to the platforms, therefore there are a wide range of possible experiments. This laboratory was used during 2017 for practical works in the course Introduction to Technology, and during 2018 in two courses of Computers Architecture at Universidad Nacional of Cuyo and in a course of Wireless Networks at Universidad de Mendoza. Some of the experiments that are been carried out by students are: to explore and analyse the architecture of computers through Linux commands, write and run programs on different programing languages, input and output operations through memory mapped addressing and isolated addressing, write interrupt service routines in order to service interrupts, multithreading programing, explore memory maps, CPU features, etc. This paper describes the testbed architecture, experiments performed by students in the mentioned subjects, present the students feedback, and describes the possible methods in order to integrate it to a remote laboratory.
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Acknowledgment
The authors acknowledge the financial support received from the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo through the project B041 “Implementación de laboratorios remotos basados en cloud computing”. Also, authors acknowledge to the professors Lucas Iacono and Osvaldo Marianetti, professors of Introduction to Technology and Computer Architecture respectively, at Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, for allow us to use our platform on their courses. In addition, authors acknowledge to the University Technological Institute (ITU) in Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, and to the Mendoza University, for allowing us to use our platform in the courses mentioned in this paper.
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Godoy, P.D., Garino, C.G.G., Cayssials, R.L. (2019). A Nomadic Testbed for Teaching Computer Architecture. In: Pesado, P., Aciti, C. (eds) Computer Science – CACIC 2018. CACIC 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 995. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20787-8_6
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