Building intelligent Things

Intelligent things becoming more important in every day life (e.g. the Internet of Things (IoT), Smart Home, Smart City, Industrie 4.0). The industry are challenged to extend their traditional products with 'intelligence' to be able to compete on the market. Computer scientists are required that are capable of developing secure and reliable software systems as well as having experience about the specific challenges of intelligent things. This duality is typically called Cyber-physical systems.
There are however often only very few chances to gain experience about practically implementing such systems during a course of study and learn about the specific challenges of developing intelligent things. It can additionally be difficult to recognise what the purpose of some theoretical concepts are and what problems they solve in practical implementations.

The IoT-Garage of the Embedded Systems department addresses this issue. We want to give students the chance to develop and work on their own ideas of an intelligent thing and bring it to reality. To this end we offer a comprehensive assistance during each phase of the development process, where resulting problems can be resolved directly. In addition we offer an extensive set of different tools required for the implementation of intelligent things. This allows students to put the learned theories to practice while working on their own ideas.

Facilities

Part of the particular facilities of the IoT-Garage are amongst other things:

• Soldering workplaces to assemble electronic devices with Through hole technology (THT) as well as Surface mount device (SMD) technology.
• Microscope to check and verify the soldering work
• 3D-Printers for the production of mechanical parts and device cases
• Lasercutter to create templates, mechanical parts or device cases out of different types of material like wood or acrylic
• CNC-Mill suited for prototypical development of circuit boards as well as processing different kinds of materials

Range of possibilities

Students can come to the IoT-Garage and to work on their own projects with the the assistance of our employees, so they can realise their own ideas.

There are no requirements to be able to work in the IoT-Garage. It is, however, important that you are willing to learn (possibly new skills).

Furthermore, additionally to the help provided by our staff, courses will be offered to learn and deepen more practical knowledge. There will be courses on, for example, "Soldering for beginners", "SMD soldering", "Machine to machine communications" or "machine learning".

Consumable materials will be offered to the students for free (as much as is possible) for the realisation of their project. This includes e.g. 3D printing materials, electronic components or microchips.

Currently offered courses:

A list of currently offered courses from students for other students can be found here.

Participation

If you are interested, please visit this moodle course, write us an E-Mail under iot-garage[at]uni-due.de, or just come around:

• BC 012
• From 03.04.2023 every Thursday at 2:00 - 4:00 pm

Funding

This project was funded under the name "Entwicklung Intelligenter Gegenstände – Von Studierenden für Studierende" within the scope of the program "Lehr-Lern-Innovationen UDE 2018" under the Förderlinie "Lehre konkret".