A virtual IoT lab, with no hardware to buy or repair

Teaching IoT on hardware means buying radio modules and gateways, losing some of them with every class, installing tools on locked-down machines, and accepting that two neighbouring groups will jam each other. Lab time goes into troubleshooting rather than understanding.

Every piece of a classic IoT lab has its counterpart in the virtual lab, and every student has their own.

• Sensors: virtual nodes driven by AT commands or Python scripts.
• Gateways: placed on a map, with a range computed by a radio propagation model.
• Network servers: real ChirpStack, Leshan or OpenThread Border Router instances, one per student.
• The frame analyser: a network inspector that decodes every frame, layer by layer.

The commands, keys, frames and admin screens are the ones found in the field. A student who got their OTAA join through in the lab knows how to do it again with a real module.

LoRaWAN, peer-to-peer LoRa, Zigbee, Thread and NB-IoT are all practised in the same interface. Each student works in an isolated environment: their mistakes do not break their neighbour’s lab.

Any programme that teaches connected-object networks and wants every student to get hands-on, not just watch.

• Engineering schools and universities: networking, telecoms, embedded systems.
• Technical colleges and vocational networking programmes.
• Continuing-education providers teaching IoT remotely.