In engineering education, there is a massive leap between understanding a concept on a whiteboard and making a physical device behave the way you want it to. To bridge that gap, engineering students from across Europe gathered at ETH Zürich for a five-day hands-on workshop organized by Red Pitaya and EESTEC LC Zurich, supported by Digi-Key.
Here is how the week unfolded, moving from basic signal generation to complex, automated robotic builds.
Before diving into robotics, the participants needed a solid hardware foundation. The week kicked off with the fundamentals—connecting the Red Pitaya, exploring the web interface, and generating continuous sine waves to see the DAQ hardware in action. Moving into Jupyter Notebooks, students executed their first code, lighting up the board's LEDs for a hardware-style "Hello World."
The complexity increased as students introduced external hardware: the op-amp board. This required precise setup, pulling power (-4V and +5V) directly from the Red Pitaya’s extension pins to the operational amplifier. Students generated continuous and burst sine waves, and then shifted to the Bode Analyzer application. By feeding a signal into the inverting network, they successfully mapped the frequency response and measured the -3dB cutoff point. Mid-way through, local ETH Zürich students joined in to tackle this exact setup together.
Once the standard workflow was clear, the focus shifted from using the tools to understanding and extending them. Students started interacting with the system at a lower level using SCPI commands, controlling the generator, acquisition, and sweep parameters programmatically. Instead of relying only on the default Bode Analyzer interface, they modified the measurement process—adjusting sweep ranges, resolution, and acquisition settings to better match their specific circuit behavior.
The Reality of Hardware Troubleshooting
Most issues came down to small setup details—wrong jumper positions, missing power, or simply probing the wrong node. Once students started verifying the signal step by step instead of assuming everything was correct, things usually started working pretty quickly.
Beyond that, a lot of confusion came from the measurement setup itself—incorrect probe attenuation, mismatched voltage ranges on the oscilloscope, or generator settings pushed outside the usable range of the circuit. These weren’t wiring problems, but understanding how the tools and signal limits affect what you actually see.
Hopefully, this gave them a solid foundation for future work—getting into the habit of checking signals properly, setting up measurements correctly, and approaching hardware problems in a more systematic way.
With the fundamentals locked down, the workshop shifted gears to the XRP robotics platform. The first step was assembly, which proved to be a smooth, intuitive, and highly enjoyable process. Following a tutorial on the XRP website, participants built their robots and ran example scripts to test the LEDs—their second "Hello World" of the week. With the hardware assembled, students paired up, brainstormed their project concepts, and got to work.
The classroom quickly transformed into an engineering playground. Desks were cluttered with duct tape, cups, and makeshift obstacles as the projects started coming to life. During this phase, participants got hands-on with the XRP's onboard hardware, decoding how the line tracking sensor worked, mapping out the echo and trigger mechanics of the distance sensor, and tuning the effort and speed parameters of the drive motors.
Connecting Red Pitaya to the Robot While the students built their custom projects, the instructors provided a live demonstration that served as the true "aha" moment of the week: integrating the Red Pitaya with the XRP robot.
First, the Red Pitaya was used to measure and visualize the exact signals the robot was sending to move its servo arm, giving students an in-depth look at sensor data at the signal level. Then, the process was reversed to control the hardware directly. The Red Pitaya generated a PWM signal to drive the servo, but the signal needed a boost to match the servo's operating voltage. By combining the Red Pitaya with the op-amp board—applying the exact concepts the students had learned on day two—the signal was successfully amplified to move the robot's arm. It was a perfect showcase of how pure STEM concepts translate into physical, moving reality.
By the final days, the focus shifted entirely to the students' custom builds. The room buzzed as everything they had learned—signal generation, hardware troubleshooting, and sensor integration—came together into cohesive engineering projects. Teams poured their creativity into their work, giving their creations personalities and names like "Mirko the Obstacle Avoider" or the "Treasure Hunter," as they prepared to showcase their final designs.
The makeshift duct-tape courses were put to the test as a room full of fully working systems powered up. The variety of the projects showcased their creativity: we saw a robot perform a "happy dance" before kicking a ball to score a goal, an obstacle avoider that navigated hurdles and found its way back, and a build that used its servo arm to scoop up a cup and park it "home." Another robot pushed obstacles out of its path to continue driving in a circle, and one highly practical build was even designed to bring you coffee.
To make the showcase even more engaging, participants voted on their favorite creations. The workshop wrapped up with a closing ceremony, celebrating the students' hard work with well-earned certificates and some classic Red Pitaya merch, including our signature socks and water bottles.
Seeing the students move from writing basic Python code to engineering real-world, moving systems in just a few days was the ultimate highlight. Bridging the gap between software and physical hardware is no small step, and these teams truly delivered.
If you caught the XRP demos at the embedded world Exhibition&Conference, you already saw a glimpse of what these robotic platforms can do. But inside this workshop, that same magic was being built from the ground up by the next generation of engineers.
We are incredibly proud of what these students accomplished. A huge thank you to Digi-Key and EESTEC LC Zurich for their partnership and for making this hands-on experience possible.