Laboratory for Real-Time and Embedded Systems

This article discusses the design and implementation of laboratory equipment suitable for teaching and research in the area of embedded and real-time systems, and examines some possible studies and avenues concerning this subject matter. The laboratory is designed and assembled around several commercially available components. Its main software components are the integrated software development environment Tornado hosted on personal computer workstations, and the VxWorks real-time operating system hosted on a single board computer. To gain hands-on experience in real-time application software, a reasonably complex digital railroad model was designed and constructed from off-the-shelf components and populated with several locomotives. The control of the digital railroad, e.g. a variety of locomotive functions and dynamic change of the railroad layout, is accomplished by real-time application software running on a single board computer connected to the railroad system. The described laboratory enables students and researchers to have an ample opportunity to gain an indepth understanding of the underlying mechanisms that govern the behavior of concurrent and interactive processes, to compare program execution in simulated and real environment, and to visually observe and verify software behavior on the real-time controlled target – the digital railroad model.