A Very Practical Approach for System Engineering Curriculum

Practical applications in engineering higher education have a very important place. Unfortunately, the laboratory instrumentation required to implement practical applications has a high cost and is highly specialized (it can only be used for certain laboratory work). For this reason, there is a tendency for many hours of practical applications to be converted into theoretical seminar classes. Another reason that supports this trend is the much larger effort of training hours for practical applications and a greater need for support staff. Regardless of motivation, this trend has a major negative impact on the training of future engineers. The past few years have brought to the attention of teachers a series of low cost and multi-disciplinary hardware platforms such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi or NodeMCU. These platforms can be the basis for designing cheap and easy to use laboratory instruments and may be an alternative to classical laboratory instrumentation. The first advantage of this solution is to obtain a multi-disciplinary solution, a hardware platform that can be used to several disciplines. The second advantage is the possibility of acquiring the platform by the students due to the extremely low cost. In this way the practical training will not only be limited to laboratory hours. This article aims to outline a set of practical examples for several disciplines in the system engineering curriculum validating an inexpensive and multi-disciplinary laboratory instrumentation solution. The proposed hardware platform is based on the ESP8266 WiFi microprocessor and is specifically designed for this purpose. Through this article, the authors hope to convey an urge to a more practical approach in technical education in general and especially in the systems engineering field.