Bringing soccer to the field of real-time embedded systems education

Abstract

With embedded systems penetrating our daily lives, there is a growing need to teach and train engineers who are well-versed in designing and developing such platforms. Owing to multi-disciplinary nature of real-time embedded systems, imparting exposure and experience in all facets of such systems is challenging. While most existing courses use a variety of hands-on projects to this end, they are usually limited to single-processor designs. In this paper, we describe a real-time embedded systems project that is being used at the National University of Singapore. The aim of the project is to develop a 5-a-side soccer system on multiple Xilinx FPGA boards using embedded processors. Besides exposing the students to real-time concepts like scheduling, handling shared resources and priority management, the project also makes them appreciate the constraints in a typical embedded system while still making it a fun experience for them. A minicompetition is organized at the end of the project where all teams compete against each other in a knock-out tournament with 5-minute games where the progress of the game is shown on an attached VGA screen. The approach adopted in the project gives students a sense of accomplishment while reinforcing the theoretical concepts. The project has been successfully run for two terms and a similar idea has been applied in another module on embedded systems.