Work-in-Progress: Experience of Teaching Internet-of-Things Using TI ARM based Connected Launchpad

Most embedded systems design efforts in industry have moved to modern 32-bit devices with networking capabilities. The widespread development of such embedded applications has led to the highly influential concept of the “Internet of Things (IoT)”. This paper describes our ongoing work of introducing the IoT technologies in an embedded networking course. We mainly present our experience of applying the TM4C1294 Connected Launchpad with two BoosterPacks Sensor Hub and SimpleLink WiFi provided by Texas Instruments (TI) to the development of course projects. The Launchpad includes a 32-bit ARM Cortex M4 microcontroller (MCU) integrated with 10/100 Ethernet MAC and PHY. TI’s Code Composer Studio (CCS) – an Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and some open source software like the lightweight TCP/IP stack called IwIP are used for software development. In this course, we introduce students the TCP/IP protocols, and wireless communication technologies like WiFi and Bluetooth. Through course projects, students study the implementation of TCP/IP protocols in practice, and learn how to use drivers of Ethernet port and WiFi connection to develop microcontroller-based networking applications. Our primary experiences indicate that TI’s connected Launchpad with various BoosterPack plugin-in modules is a flexible, cost-effective, well-supported platform for teaching embedded networking and developing IoT applications.