Cheap Microcontrollers Research Articles

A Wireless Voting System Using Wi-Fi-Based Microcontrollers and Face Verification

Voting systems nowadays are highly interesting due to their importance in expressing opinions. The proposed work aims to design a cost-effective and reliable Electronic Voting System (EVS) that can tackle the issues faced by manual election. The system uses small and lowcost microcontrollers with Wi-Fi network connectivity to avoid the issues of installing wire connections. Eligible voters are authenticated by recognizing their faces using deep neural networks (VGG-16 model). The Wi-Fi connections between the server and the clients are carried out through the Internet Protocol suite (TCP/IP) transmission method to ensure data arrival without loss. The client’s side comprises four small and cheap microcontrollers known as ESP8266-01, whereas the server side contains one NodeMCU ESP8266-12E microcontroller connected to a program computer. The voting results are displayed using the Visual Basic programming language. The system is specifically designed to facilitate voting on a particular opinion by providing two options: (Yes) and (No). Besides, it can be utilized for electing a committee manager or group leader and can be expanded to accommodate more options. The VGG model’s robustness is demonstrated through experiments, achieving 99.12% accuracy on Faces96 images and 98.61% on our database. Moreover, the practical implementation of the election process demonstrates that the system is highly reliable, secure and cost-effective.

Організація взаємодії пристроїв з доступом в інтернет на основі мікроконтролерів із обмеженою кількістю ресурсів

The subject of study in this article and research are technologies and models of remote communication of nodes, as well as individual small-sized components of embedded IoT systems. The goal is to simplify the process of configuration by the end user of the system based on devices with the possibility of communication over Internet. The task is: to analyze the problems and requirements for the creation of IoT systems; to perform the analysis and classification of the hardware components of IoT systems; to analyze the process of the communication between individual elements of IoT system; to perform the research of the communication protocols for IoT; to analyze an existing services for organization of the communication of devices with the possibility of connection to the Internet; to propose the models of the communication of the elements of IoT system. According to the tasks, the following results were obtained. The existing ways and problems of communicating of devices with Internet connection are analyzed. Possible technical solutions and components of IoT systems are analyzed. The classification of the set of components of such IoT systems is performed. The process of selecting the components based on the set of initial requirements with taking into account the parameters of the price, the necessary efforts for customer to deploy the system and the possibility of modification of the system is proposed. The problems of creation of systems with the Internet access using cheap microcontrollers with a small program memory and taking into account the requirements of limited resources is discussed. The process of the communication of the service with the device and connected peripheral modules is described in detail. The analysis of existing protocols for communication between the service and IoT device is performed. The models that describe possible types of interaction of individual nodes are offered. Conclusions. The performed analysis allowed to classify and highlight five types of components for creation of IoT systems and to correlate their price, required efforts for installation and the possibility of modification by customer. The service for simple communication with microcontrollers with limited resources and the open source service for creation of secure smart home system with wide support of protocols are found. The practical significance of this study is the possibility to decide what a set of components is the most suitable for a specific distributed hardware system, as well as the possibility to choose the model of interaction and to choose the communication protocol with finding or creation of the service for IoT communication.

A User-Friendly and Economical Six-Axis Force/Torque Sensor With Wireless Communication for Force Control and Monitoring

Six-axis force/torque (F/T) sensors have been actively developed owing to the increasing demand for force control and monitoring in many engineering applications. However, these sensors are expensive and complicated to use, particularly the wireless ones. This study presents a user-friendly and economical wireless six-axis F/T sensor for force control and monitoring applications. A newly designed elastic structure was used to overcome the reliability degradation and high machining cost problems of the elastic structures developed in our previous study. T-shaped structures were arranged symmetrically around the upper and lower parts, reducing the manufacturing cost. The electrical and electronic circuits for economical analog/digital signal processing, including zero calibration, were developed based on cheap microcontrollers. A user-friendly embedded wireless communication module was programmed at a low machine level for fast force control and monitoring. Additionally, we implemented a universal serial bus (USB)-wired F/T sensor similar to the wireless unit, except for wired communication. The effectiveness of the proposed F/T sensor was demonstrated by experimental tests and comparison with a commercial F/T sensor.

Система управления температурой внутри помещения, основанная на технологии связи по видимому свету

The article proposes a new approach to temperature control in a building based on the Visible Light Communications technology. This approach is based on using LED lamps as temperature data transmitters as well as for lighting. Light modulation based on the UART standard was used for data transfer. A photodiode with the capability to distinguish relatively weak signals was used for receiving data. All data processing was performed by microcontrollers. UART-based modulation was also performed on a microcontrolle. The article describes in detail schematic circuits of transmitting and receiving devices. Based on developeed schematic circuits, a new experimental setup consisting of two units was created. The transmission unit includes a temperature sensor, a microcontroller, a driver and an LED. The receiving unit includes a photodiode, an amplifier and a microcontroller. An ATmega328P chip was used for both microcontrollers. Experimental setup consists of experimental models of both units. For signal transmission control, measurements of the pulse level and shape were conducted in the receiving device with an oscillograph. The signal level was anaylsed after all electronic components but before entering the microcontroller. Experimental results have shown that data transmission with the use of white LEDs was relatively stable. This allows the possibility of organising wireless control of temperature conditions on premises without Wi-Fi. Perspective uses of temperature control with white LEDs approach include the creation of “Smart house» control system without using wirelines and with cheap microcontrollers, which signficiantly decreases costs of the system.

CNC Software Control System Using Visual Basic

Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machines are having a great industrial role in the progress of humanity to furnish an exactly crafted pieces for different tools and instruments. In the last decade their use had become more popular due to the cheap microcontrollers that emerged and still emerging. The 3D printers’ availability made manufacturing of CNC machines simpler. But the need for easing the means to program a CNC machine is still required. This paper gives a software which is intended to make dealing with G-code used with this type of machines easier. This software allows the user to execute manually any step he wants in predefined steps which can be changed on demand, return to origin of working palette, control the working head to any level demanded. Also, it can transform any G-code already prepared to the CNC machine. This software is built using the visual basic vb6.net. The microcontroller used is the Arduino uno, the mechanical set is locally prepared, and the presented application is for line drawing. CNC machines can do a variety of jobs including; drilling, plotting, engraving, laser cut, PCB drilling … etc. This software had been tested successfully for drawing with ability to show the G-code for each manual movement. Applying it to other CNC applications demands changing the operation head and care for each condition application circumstances.

Accelerating Deep Learning Inference in Constrained Embedded Devices Using Hardware Loops and a Dot Product Unit

Deep learning algorithms have seen success in a wide variety of applications, such as machine translation, image and speech recognition, and self-driving cars. However, these algorithms have only recently gained a foothold in the embedded systems domain. Most embedded systems are based on cheap microcontrollers with limited memory capacity, and, thus, are typically seen as not capable of running deep learning algorithms. Nevertheless, we consider that advancements in compression of neural networks and neural network architecture, coupled with an optimized instruction set architecture, could make microcontroller-grade processors suitable for specific low-intensity deep learning applications. We propose a simple instruction set extension with two main components-hardware loops and dot product instructions. To evaluate the effectiveness of the extension, we developed optimized assembly functions for the fully connected and convolutional neural network layers. When using the extensions and the optimized assembly functions, we achieve an average clock cycle count decrease of 73% for a small scale convolutional neural network. On a per layer base, our optimizations decrease the clock cycle count for fully connected layers and convolutional layers by 72% and 78%, respectively. The average energy consumption per inference decreases by 73%. We have shown that adding just hardware loops and dot product instructions has a significant positive effect on processor efficiency in computing neural network functions.

Measurement of 40 power system harmonics in real‐time on an economical ARM ® Cortex™‐M3 platform

Within future homes and electrical power networks, emphasis is being placed on intelligent, distributed measurement devices. In particular, the recognition of individual or aggregated loads through harmonic signature has been proposed as a useful way to enhance the value of home energy monitoring/control. Clearly, the cost of implementing such measurement devices is a major barrier to acceptance. In a recent project, a challenge was set to implement real-time software on an ARM® Cortex™ LPC1768 microcontroller platform (chip cost c. £4). The software must be capable of measuring a single-phase AC frequency, real and reactive power flows and provide a full breakdown of the voltage and current (and power) behaviour via harmonic analysis from DC to the 40th, in real-time with a new output every 20 ms. In addition, the algorithm must be capable of adapting the measurement when the frequency is not nominal (50 Hz) so that spectral leakage is minimised. It is found that the LPC1768 processor is capable of supporting such an algorithm when it is coded appropriately. This knowledge de-risks the proposed use of such cheap microcontrollers for these relatively complex tasks.

Real-time monitoring of ubiquitous wireless ECG sensor node for medical care using ZigBee

Sensor networks have the potential to impact many aspects of medical care greatly. By outfitting patients with wireless, wearable vital sign sensors, collecting detailed real-time data on physiological status can be greatly simplified. In this article, we propose the system architecture for smart sensor platform based on advanced wireless sensor networks. An emerging application for wireless sensor networks involves their use in medical care. In hospitals or clinics, outfitting every patient with tiny, wearable wireless vital sign sensors would allow doctors, nurses and other caregivers to continuously monitor the status of their patients. In an emergency or disaster scenario, the same technology would enable medics to more effectively care for a large number of casualties. First responders could receive immediate notifications on any changes in patient status, such as respiratory failure or cardiac arrest. Wireless sensor network is a set of small, autonomous devices, working together to solve different problems. It is a relatively new technology, experiencing true expansion in the past decade. People have realised that integration of small and cheap microcontrollers with sensors can result in the production of extremely useful devices, which can be used as an integral part of the sensor nets. These devices are called sensor nodes. Today, sensor nets are used in agriculture, ecology and tourism, but medicine is the area where they certainly meet the greatest potential. This article presents a medical smart sensor node platform. This article proposes a wireless two-lead EKG. These devices collect heart rate and EKG data and relay it over a short-range (300 m) wireless network to any number of receiving devices, including PDAs, laptops or ambulance-based terminals.

A data logger for teaching data capturing and analysis to engineering students

AbstractData logging is the process of collecting and storing data from an experiment. Traditionally, data from science experiments was collected manually by hand and graphs were produced using pen and paper. By the introduction of cheap and powerful microcontrollers, all data logging operations are currently carried out using microcontroller‐based data logging devices. This article describes the design of an educational microcontroller‐based data logger device, which can be used to collect and save data for both offline and online analysis. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 18: 397–405, 2010; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com); DOI 10.1002/cae.20281