Senior lecturing staff at PKU with representatives from Smart Device Innovationn Lab sponsors ARM, ST and Nordic
Nordic has over the past 18 months or so been working in partnership with ARM on a partnership program for universities called ‘Lab-in-a-Box’. This program has been a great success with universities around the globe. To date, more than 40 universities, including some very prestigious, are currently in adoption or evaluating the program for inclusion in their curricula. We reached an important milestone some weeks ago when we had a joint launch ceremony of 'The Smart Device Innovation Lab’ at Peking University in China where over 200 students will get to develop and innovate with Bluetooth Smart on Nordic’s nRF51822 SoC.
Reaching out to China’s engineering talent
There was a special feeling of accomplishment with this program. China has long been the world’s manufacturing heartland, but more recently it is demonstrating its ability to lead with innovation also. Engineering and Computer Science courses are massively over-subscribed and technical education is generally more popular than here in the western world, attracting many of China’s brightest and best students. This bodes well for the continued growth of the Chinese economy. Attracting top talent to engineering studies is something we need to address in the west, but that’s a different blog story.
For many a year semiconductor companies have had university sponsorship programs and these have shown themselves to be beneficial to all involved. Engineering depts. Get access to the latest cutting edge technologies, students are excited knowing they are learning about subjects and techniques that are in demand by their future employers, and semiconductor companies get to put a friendly hand on the student’s shoulders by showing them how their technology is the best around. Sure, it’s a good business case for semi firms but it really does help all involved. Access to China has steadily become more open and to be sponsoring a Bluetooth Smart Device Lab which will help these students develop the future of IoT is a milestone.
Lab-in-a-Box
Lab-in-a-Box (LiB) is ARM’s concept of a full semester package of educational collateral and hands-on for Masters and Bachelor degree courses. It comprises of a full suite of lecture material with presentations and lecturer’s notes. The Nordic LiB has 14 full lecture sessions covered. Topics covered are ARM A-series and Cortex-M series processors, Bluetooth Smart, RF design techniques, Embedded systems, nRF51 series SoC architecture, nRF51 Software architecture, Mobile App development, embedded C programming, and more. It is a very rich program and so far students and lecturers alike love it.
The LiB uses ARM’s mbed platform for IoT development. This simplifies software development and help scale projects using multiple different layers that IoT inherently brings to product development. Mbed has an extensive set of open source code libraries and tools and is a thriving community where students and other developers can collaborate and improve software together. 6 hands-on labs are available with all hardware and and code examples included. In these step-by-step labs students are taken through building an embedded system that communicates with a smartphone app and culminates in a complete Bluetooth Smart system that controls a Pololu robot
Alternatively, there is a full project with a Bluetooth Smart RGB lamp which is fully controllable in terms of color, brightness etc. from the smartphone. A real smart home example application.
The nRF51 SoC and its complimentary nRF51 DK are at the heart of this course and we already hear from students how excited they are to find out just how much they are able to achieve with a single chip such as this.
The ARM/Nordic LiB is gaining new adherents with every passing week, and in 2016 there will be even more courses for lecturers to choose from. We at Nordic are really happy to be involved with assisting universities in this way, of course it benefits us to have students entering the job market armed with skills on Nordic parts, but it does feel good to be genuinely helping them learn the real skills that are needed today by employers, and see the excitement they feel when exploring what can be done with Nordic Bluetooth Smart SoCs.
If you are a member of staff at a university or technical college and have an interest in learning more about this LiB course or wish to evaluate it for your own dept. please follow the link below
ARM/Nordic Lab-in-a-Box: http://www.arm.com/support/university/educators/embedded/
Learn more about mbed: https://www.mbed.com/en/