Building A Collection of Labs for Teaching IoT Courses

摘要

This paper introduces a collection of labs that can be used for teaching Internet of Things (IoT) courses. An IoT system consists of physical devices, the Internet, and the cloud. The labs are designed to give students opportunity to experiment with these three aspects of IoT. On the physical devices side, the labs use a Raspberry Pi single board computer, selected sensors and actuators. On the software side, Python libraries are used for coding device interfaces and IoT applications. Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT is the cloud platform used by the labs. A laptop computer with a Virtual Network Computing (VNC) client installed serves as the development platform which connects to the Raspberry Pi computer via a local WiFi network. The Raspberry Pi computer interacts with sensors and actuators and communicates with the AWS IoT cloud service through the Internet. The paper provides details on how the labs are developed. Test results are presented to illustrate how the labs work.