Development Boards Made in WEL
Course hardware designed, built and supported in-house for more than a decade.
Hardware required for laboratory courses at WEL is primarily designed and manufactured in-house. This tradition has been in place for more than ten years, and numerous students and staff have participated in developing — and benefited from using — such hardware for courses and projects.
Beyond the course boards
What else gets built here
Application-specific PCB development
Staff and students at WEL work closely with research groups across the Department of Electrical Engineering — the Cyber Physical Systems lab, the Photonics and Quantum Enabled Sensing Technology (P-Quest) lab and others — on application-specific electronic system development.
Recent and ongoing systems include an FPGA-based smart structural health monitoring system for guided-wave ultrasonics with machine learning models deployed at the edge; a high-density EEG recording system powered by an RFSoC, doing low-latency feature extraction and event classification in hardware straight from raw time-domain signals; and portable quantum sensing systems.
Know-how and IP for prototyping
Staff and students have built up a large collection of intellectual property, resources and technical content for development platforms and prototyping kits, much of it drawing on open-source work.
It includes introductory guides for developing custom digital systems on the PYNQ-Z2 board with a Xilinx XC7Z020 SoC; Internet of Things platforms around the Texas Instruments CC3235SF, a Wi-Fi-enabled ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller; and prototyping material for the STMicroelectronics STM32 ARM Cortex-M family and the Raspberry Pi Pico.
WEL also holds a substantial body of verified content and reference designs covering analog front-end and instrumentation, embedded systems, wireless connectivity and human-machine interfaces.
Also from the bench
Krypton
Krypton is an Intel MAX V CPLD development board built at WEL for digital design experiments, and remains part of the family of in-house boards used across courses at IIT Bombay and other colleges.
Availability
Borrowing a board
Boards and the modules that go with them can be taken from WEL for a specific time period through the online request portal. Course kits are issued through the teaching lab staff.