Students bring a complete engineering workbench home in their backpacks—transforming “anytime, anywhere” from a slogan into a systematic approach to hands-on learning.
On November 19, 2025, ECEDHA hosted a comprehensive webinar featuring Southern Methodist University’s Electrical and Computer Engineering department, showcasing their innovative approach to modernizing ECE education. The session brought together four distinct voices—department leadership, faculty, graduate lab instructors, and undergraduate students—each offering unique insights into how portable, software-defined instrumentation is reshaping engineering education.
Dr. Mahesh Krishnamurthy, SMU’s ECE Department Chair, opened with a frank assessment of traditional ECE lab education circa 2020. His team identified three fundamental problems:
Scalability limits
High costs of ownership, space-intensive setups, and infrastructure misaligned with evolving learning practices made traditional labs difficult to expand or modernize.
Limited flexibility
Equipment tethered to physical locations restricted student learning to scheduled lab hours, preventing the iterative experimentation that characterizes real engineering practice.
Continuity gaps
Classroom theory and lab practice remained siloed, with modeling and simulation failing to connect meaningfully to hands-on skills. Students lacked pathways for continuous skill development between formal lab sessions.
SMU’s response centers on what they call LABtop™—a systematic approach that mirrors how laptops democratized access to knowledge by making computation portable and personal.
“Just as laptops enabled students to learn, compute, and create anywhere,” Dr. Krishnamurthy explained, “LABtop™ brings portable, personalized engineering practice directly to students, enabling them to experiment, analyze, and prototype anywhere.”
The initiative follows a deliberate progression:
Dr. Prasanna Rangarajan, Associate Professor and Chair of SMU’s Lab Committee, detailed how this vision manifests in the Signals & Systems course—a sophomore-level class that historically struggled with abstraction and the theory–practice divide.
The core challenge
Students first encounter concepts such as time-domain analysis, frequency spectra, sampling, quantization, convolution, and filtering. Without immediate practical reinforcement, these topics can remain overwhelming abstractions.
SMU’s solution
A three-part integration using Red Pitaya STEMlab boards:
This “S&S Trifecta” connects three critical domains—time domain (x[n]), transform domain (H(z)), and spectrum (X(e^jω))—through unified tools accessible via Signal Generator, Spectrum Analyzer, and Bode Analyzer apps.
Key pedagogical benefits include:
“Beyond using it in the lab, Red Pitaya gives students the flexibility to use the platform in course projects, senior design experiences, and even to ideate concepts they’re personally interested in,” Dr. Rangarajan noted. “This versatility was critical for our needs.”
Danyal Ahsanullah, a PhD candidate who developed and taught the Signals & Systems lab—earning SMU’s Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor recognition—provided ground-level insights on implementation.
The COVID advantage
The transition to Red Pitaya proved invaluable during the pandemic. “We experienced zero disruption during COVID,” Ahsanullah explained. “We could teach in-class and remote students in a hybrid format seamlessly because students had their own hardware.”
Lab curriculum highlights include:
A critical implementation detail emerged: while Red Pitaya is “versatile with limited measurement precision compared to specialized instruments,” this trade-off is pedagogically sound. Students learn fundamental concepts without being distracted by the complexity of professional-grade equipment.
“We physically create LTI systems on one Red Pitaya and analyze them with another to understand frequency response and temporal behavior,” Ahsanullah explained. “Students measure frequency responses of simple RC filters, then progress to identifying unknown component values—reinforcing the connection between theory and measurement.”
Cooper Shapard, an IEEE Student Representative and senior ECE student, currently teaches two labs using Red Pitaya (ECE 1181 – Microcontrollers and Embedded Systems Lab, and ECE 2170 – Signals & Systems Lab). His perspective spans student, instructor, and student leader roles.
As a student: learning anytime, anywhere
“Student schedules are unpredictable—the best working times are often when labs are closed,” Shapard noted. “With Red Pitaya, I could get ‘unstuck’ by iterating on my own time, something a traditional three-hour lab slot never allowed.”
As an instructor: teaching concepts, not buttons
“Systems work on the go and are individualized,” he explained. “We spend less time on the ‘how’ and more on the ‘why.’ Each student gets their own lab equipment, so they all learn how to use oscilloscopes, function generators, and analyzers themselves—not just watch a lab partner do it.”
Core lab instruction time dropped from three hours to approximately one hour, with students completing deeper exploration independently.
As a student leader: going beyond the lab
“This semester, three students requested Red Pitayas for personal projects outside class requirements,” Shapard shared. “It lets us take ideas from initial concept to physical hardware prototype. Those small feedback loops really accelerate learning.”
SMU’s Fall 2025 LABtop™ cohort integrates Red Pitaya across the entire ECE curriculum:
Near-term rollout plan:
Webinar participants consistently emphasized tangible outcomes.
Institutional benefits:
Pedagogical benefits:
Student experience:
SMU’s journey illustrates a key insight: hardware is necessary but insufficient for curriculum transformation. The real challenge lies in developing teaching materials, training assistants, onboarding students, providing technical support, and maintaining equipment at scale.
To address this, Red Pitaya and SMU have partnered to create the Curriculum Collective, a community-driven initiative offering:
“We’re excited about what’s ahead,” Dr. Krishnamurthy concluded. “We know we’re just scratching the surface.”