Lowering barriers on embedded system design - Turning innovations into prototypes

Embedded system development platforms have made designing prototypes and devices possible outside the engineering domain. While interdisciplinary community and maker movement have strongly adopted breakout physical computing toolkits, such as Arduino, it is not only hobbyists utilizing them.  Easy accessibility toolkits are used in various research and scientific projects and in engineering education. Using embedded system development platforms have become a widespread practice of both engineers and non-engineers alike, covering almost every field. While more accessible tools save beginners from many low-level problems, embedded system design still requires a set of skills which may seem overwhelming for novices. Getting started can be burdensome especially for non-engineers as embedded systems are a mixture of both software and hardware with challenging subareas, such as programming.  This dissertation explores which tools and processes would lower the threshold of designing embedded systems, enabling non-engineers and novice engineers to turn their innovations into working prototypes in such way that the workflow allows experimentational prototypes to evolve into deployable embedded systems.  As a result, a method is presented, including a framework for selecting novice friendly sensors, a minimalistic approach for teaching robot prototyping, an IoT rapid prototyping laboratory setup and a case study employing the same tools for developing satellite subsystems as those that are applicable for multidisciplinary novice use. In the case workshops, all student groups successfully completed the given prototyping tasks. In addition to tangible results, reception of the subject, including typically burdensome areas such as programming, was very positive.