A Remote Laboratory for Teaching Internet of Things in Online Education

Like almost in every field, application and design of IoT is also important in mechanical enginering for construction of automated machines, production lines and process plants. Education of engineers has to follow this trend. A new course on this field was established and had to be organised online according to Covid pandemic restrictions. The challenge to enable online programming exercises on an embedded system, where students at home control some process hardware over the internet, had to be solved. In this work, a solution is presented. Three communication paths were used, one was an office communication platform for creating a virtual classroom. Furthermore a server providing command line interfaces for communication of the programmers with the target hardware was established. Finally, an external MQTT broker was used for data exchange of the controller hardware with an application running on the PC. A low-cost hardware was contructed to provide a realistic thermal process. About twenty students completed the course with good results.