A Nomadic Testbed for Teaching Computer Architecture

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. The student 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 the course Computers Architecture at Universidad Nacional of Cuyo. Some of the experiments that are been carried out by students are: to explore and analyse the architecture of the 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.