Students of architectural engineering and related disciplines have difficulty understanding the interdependence of the various systems and components that comprise commercial building HVAC, automation, and control systems, as well as their associated applications. This paper describes the development of a mobile building automation systems laboratory, coined BASmobile, for use in education and research, which illustrates how commercial building energy systems and their control counterparts look and operate on a miniaturized scale. The small size of the lab, and its resultant mobility, allows it to be moved into classrooms on demand, where students gather hands-on experience by programming realistic control applications and monitoring the resultant response of the systems under control using a Web-based interface. A companion paper describes the application of the BASmobile for education in greater detail. Moreover, the BASmobile has been used to provide controlled environmental conditions in individual offices for research purposes and is currently used in an investigation of fault detection and diagnostics of control systems.