Current aspects

SDR

Currently, I’m redesigning the telecommunications course TEL10. The course has always been split between theory (Fourier, Information theory, Modulation theory) and lab work. The lab part used to involve a low frequency mixer with a bandwidth of 1 MHz and generating DSB, DSB-SC, SSB, ASK, PSK, FSK signals on a protoboard. The low frequencies were required for the protoboard, but also meant nothing was sent wirelessly.

With the advent of Software Defined Radio’s, it’s time to go digital! Students can transmit signals, practically learn about signal degradation, things like time and frequency synchronization and really experience aspects like SNR, spectral efficiency, and complexity of several solutions. On top of that it is now easy to add extra layers to enable actual data-transfer.

To this end I’ve translated this fantastic book by Marc Lichtman to Dutch and I am redoing the labs and theory involved.

Rust

Rust is an emerging language that is becoming a fast favorite in security-oriented applications (think kernels). Embedded Rust is also emerging, so last year I’ve delved into this world while developing the RTS10 course. Unfortunately Rust itself hasn’t been ported completely yet so things like ‘Fearless concurrency’ isn’t applicable to embedded systems (yet).