  Due to the pandemic of COVID-19, many university courses had to abruptly
transform to enable remote teaching. Adjusting courses on embedded systems and
micro-controllers was extra challenging since interaction with real hardware is
their integral part. We start by comparing our experience with four basic
alternatives of teaching embedded systems: 1) interacting with hardware at
school, 2) having remote access to hardware, 3) lending hardware to students
for at-home work and 4) virtualizing hardware. Afterward, we evaluate in detail
our experience of the fast transition from traditional, offline at-school
hardware programming course to using remote access to real hardware present in
the lab. The somewhat unusual remote hardware access approach turned out to be
a fully viable alternative for teaching embedded systems, enabling a relatively
low-effort transition. Our setup is based on existing solutions and stable open
technologies without the need for custom-developed applications that require
high maintenance. We evaluate the experience of both the students and teachers
and condense takeaways for future courses. The specific environment setup is
available online as an inspiration for others.
