Development Of Embedded Systems Research Articles

Application of JTAG Boundary Scan to Embedded System Development

Application of JTAG Boundary Scan to Embedded System Development

Design and Implementation of I2C Protocol for Reading ADT7420 Sensor on Nexys A7 Board

This paper presents a detailed Verilog HDL implementation of an I2C protocol in particular designed to interface with the ADT7420 temperature sensor on the Nexys A7 board, offering temperature readings in both Celsius and Fahrenheit scales. By addressing intricate configuration challenges, we meticulously outline our FPGA-based solution, prioritizing efficiency and reliability in data transmission. Through comprehensive experimentation, we substantiate the accuracy and versatility of our design, showcasing its potential across diverse domains such as IoT, industrial automation, and environmental monitoring. This contribution significantly propels advancements in embedded systems development, offering a robust framework for temperature sensing applications. Index Terms: I2C Protocol, ADT7420 Temperature Sensor, Nexys A7 Board, Celsius and Fahrenheit Readings, FPGA Implementation, Verilog HDL, Embedded Systems.

Rapid Embedded Systems Prototyping Redefined: TARS Plug and Play Electronics for Industry, Scientific, and Education

This article marks the inception of the TARS Electronic board series, addressing the challenges inherent in Internet of Things (IoT) and embedded systems development. Traditional approaches often consume significant human-hours in addressing issues like breadboard errors, coding, and soldering during prototype realization. TARS plug-and-play electronic modules emerge as a transformative solution, minimizing time and effort while offering an ideal platform for micro and small-scale enterprises, students, and researchers. Featuring the capability to integrate over fifty sensors and various electronic components, including HDMI, Bluetooth, ZigBee, and IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi, this board transforms into a cluster of IoT systems, streamlining development processes and fostering innovation. Additionally, it serves as an excellent platform for skill development of the electronics engineering workforce, enhancing proficiency and expertise in emerging technologies.

Traditional art design expression based on embedded system development.

This article describes constructing an embedded system for a painting art and style presentation platform, achieving the automatic integration of digital painting art with traditional art design. The frontend components are designed using the Bootstrap framework, with Django as the web development framework and TensorFlow architecture integrated into the code. Furthermore, the Inception module and residual connections are introduced to optimize the visual geometry group (VGG) network for recognizing and analyzing image texture features. Compared to other models, experimental results indicate that the proposed model demonstrates a 2.6% increase in image style classification accuracy, reaching 87.34% and 95.33% in architectural and landscape image classification, respectively. The system's operational outcomes reveal that the proposed platform alleviates the burden on the logical function modules of the system, enhances scalability, and promotes the automated fusion of digital painting art with traditional art design expression.

Enhancing embedded systems development with TS$$^-$$

Enhancing embedded systems development with TS$$^-$$

A Synthesis-Based Stateful Approach for Guiding Design Thinking in Embedded System Development

Embedded systems have attracted more attention and have become more critical due to the recent computer technology advancements and applications in various areas, such as healthcare, transportation, and manufacturing. Traditional software design approaches and the finite state machine cannot provide sufficient support due to two major reasons: the increasing need for more functions in designing an embedded system and sequential controls in the implementation. This deficiency particularly discourages inexperienced engineers who use conventional methods to design embedded software. Hence, we proposed a design method, the Synthesis-Based Stateful Software Design Approach (SSSDA), which synthesizes two existing methods, the Synthesis-Based Software Design Framework (SSDF) and Process and Artifact State Transition Abstraction (PASTA), to remedy the drawback of conventional methods. To show how to conduct our proposed design approach and investigate how it supports embedded system design, we studied an industrial project developed by a sophomore student team. Our results showed that our proposed approach could significantly help students lay out modules, improve testability, and reduce defects.

Embedded System Development for Detection of Railway Track Surface Deformation Using Contour Feature Algorithm

Derailment of trains is not unusual all around the world, especially in developing countries, due to unidentified track or rolling stock faults that cause massive casualties each year. For this purpose, a proper condition monitoring system is essential to avoid accidents and heavy losses. Generally, the detection and classification of railway track surface faults in real-time requires massive computational processing and memory resources and is prone to a noisy environment. Therefore, in this paper, we present the development of a novel embedded system prototype for condition monitoring of railway track. The proposed prototype system works in real-time by acquiring railway track surface images and performing two tasks a) detect deformation (i.e., faults) like squats, shelling, and spalling using the contour feature algorithm and b) the vibration signature on that faulty spot by synchronizing acceleration and image data. A new illumination scheme is also proposed to avoid the sunlight reflection that badly affects the image acquisition process. The contour detection algorithm is applied here to detect the uneven shapes and discontinuities in the geometrical structure of the railway track surface, which ultimately detects unhealthy regions. It works by converting Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) images into binary images, which distinguishes the unhealthy regions by making them white color while the healthy regions in black color. We have used the multiprocessing technique to overcome the massive processing and memory issues. This embedded system is developed on Raspberry Pi by interfacing a vision camera, an accelerometer, a proximity sensor, and a Global Positioning System (GPS) sensors (i.e., multi-sensors). The developed embedded system prototype is tested in real-time onsite by installing it on a Railway Inspection Trolley (RIT), which runs at an average speed of 15 km/h. The functional verification of the proposed system is done successfully by detecting and recording the various railway track surface faults. An unhealthy frame’s onsite detection processing time was recorded at approximately 25.6 ms. The proposed system can synchronize the acceleration data on specific railway track deformation. The proposed novel embedded system may be beneficial for detecting faults to overcome the conventional manual railway track condition monitoring, which is still being practiced in various developing or underdeveloped countries.

Analysis of Power Management for Hard Real-Time Embedded System between Adaptive Power Management Method and Idle Energy Reduction Method

Static and dynamic power management have become crucial in real-world applications of embedded systems development. While many technologies and algorithms can reduce power consumption efficiently, like dynamic voltage and frequency scaling, varying voltage and frequency make overall power consumption less efficient. The comprehensive embedded system spends time and energy on the transition between states, voltage, and frequency. To better understand how these problems can be addressed, this paper will explore two methods, the adaptive power management method and the idle state energy reduction method, to mitigate issues on the algorithm side. Furthermore, this paper is intended to give researchers and real-time embedded systems developers an overview of power management methods and to help them better develop the embedded systems.

Toward Requirements for Embedded Systems

Context: Embedded System (ES) is a component of a larger system embedded in a product, it is designed to repeatedly perform a specific function, while maintaining its operation under different constraints. For this reason, these systems are highly complex. Therefore, the challenges for effective and efficient development are immense. Many problems are related to mistakes in the requirements engineering phase. Thus, a Requirements Engineering (RE) process is crucial in ES development. Objective: to analyze and understand studies of RE approaches that are used for embedded systems development. Method: We carried out a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) in order to find answers to our questions and better understand the requirements engineering context for ES. Results: We uncovered 92 studies and (1) evidence the benefits to using the studies in requirements engineering activities; (2) we found out the RE phases that are attracting more attention; (3) the main requirements modeling styles used; (4) the types of requirements modelled; (5) we identified 6 embedded systems domain in which requirements engineering is taken into account; (6) the use of tools to support their approaches, and (7) the existing challenges/problems. We also proposed a research agenda. Conclusions: Hence, in this paper we present a body of knowledge in ER for SE derived from a large-scale SLR. We believe the results will benefit both researchers and practitioners.

Application of Object Oriented Programming Paradigm in Embedded Systems Development

Application of Object Oriented Programming Paradigm in Embedded Systems Development

Embedded System Development of Automatic Water Quality and Growing LED Control System to Maintain Hydroponic Plant Growth

Abstract— Hydroponics is a farming technology using water media that has been mixed with mineral nutrients that are continuously flowed to plant roots for 24 hours every day. The height of water reserves, water temperature, water nutrient content and water pH are some of the factors that need to be considered in growing crops using the hydroponic method. The function of automatic control of water quality and light requirements is very important to maintain the growth of hydroponic plants. The function of automatic control of water quality can be accomplished by developing software from a hardware system equipped with a dosingpump module for adding mineral nutrients and/or adjusting pH to water. Periodically the system will maintain water quality based on the calculation of input data obtained from water quality sensors, as well as report the quality of water from hydroponic plants directly through a computer network based on TCP/IP. In this study, a complete minimum system model with a hydroponic farming system and LED grow-light will be developed which is the result of improvements from previous research. The water pH and water conductivity (EC) sensors can be activated simultaneously. The dosing-pump module is used to add a liquid that regulates the pH value of water and plant nutrient fluids automatically according to the specified target, and the LED grow-light will automatically turn on and off to help maximize hydroponic plant growth. An Embedded WEB application is also available to increase the ease of monitoring. Keywords—Remote control and monitoring, Automatic Control, Hydroponic water quality

Dysfunctional Agile–Stage-Gate Hybrid Development: Keeping Up Appearances

Increasingly, the development of today’s “smart” products requires the integration of both software and hardware in embedded systems. To develop these, hardware firms typically enlist the expertise of software development firms to offer integrated solutions. While hardware firms often work according to a plan-driven approach, software development firms draw on Agile development methods. Interestingly, empirically little is known about the implications and consequences of working according to contrasting development methods in a collaborative project. In response to this research gap, we conducted a process study of a collaborative development project involving a software firm and a hardware firm, within which the two firms worked according to contrasting development methods. We found that the software firm was gradually compelled to forgo its Agile method, creating a role conflict in terms of its way of working. As such, our results contribute to the literature on Agile–Stage-Gate hybrids by demonstrating how, in collaborative embedded systems development, hybridization of development methods may cause projects to fail. Our main practical implication entails the introduction of the “sequential Agile approach.”

Development of Automatic Gear Shifting for Bicycle Riding Based on Physiological Information and Environment Sensing

This paper presents the development of an intelligent bicycle system with automatic gear shifting based on the user’s physiological information and environment sensing. The sensor data are collected during the ride, uploaded to the cloud database, and analyzed using random forest to derive the appropriate riding requirement. Our proposed technique performs the automatic gear shifting operation using inexpensive sensor components and embedded system development boards. The gear shifting module is designed and installed as an external device for the off-the-shelf bicycle, without the need to dismantle or modify the body structure. A bicycle riding specific online management interface is developed for web access and administration. It allows the cloud data being displayed and let users acquire and understand their riding behaviors. The experiments and evaluation in the outdoor environment have demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed intelligent gear shifting system.

Protected Spaces

Embedded system developers are looking to container technology to try and couple easier software deployment with a mission-critical core.

Reliability and availability prediction of embedded systems based on environment modeling and simulation

The embedded system developers often need to perform software testing even when the target hardware is inaccessible. Due to the inaccessibility of the hardware, the hardware-software interaction testing becomes a challenging task. Researchers have tried to overcome this issue by developing an environment model that simulates the behavior of the actual hardware. In the existing literature, environment modeling has been used for embedded software testing and rarely used for reliability and availability prediction. In this study, we make an attempt to use the environment model for the reliability and availability prediction when actual hardware is inaccessible. At first, we model the hardware environment simulator referring to the System Requirements Specification document. Then, we use the environment simulator for simulating different operational scenarios of the hardware. Based on the operational scenarios, random test cases are generated for testing the embedded software. Finally, we predict the reliability and availability of the system using the test results. Four important aspects covered in this prediction approach are: 1) developing a method for system reliability and availability prediction using environment modeling and simulation technique, 2) considering software-related hardware and hardware-related software interaction failures, 3) applying the proposed reliability and availability model to a case study, and 4) validating the method by comparing the results with an existing approach.

Classification of Actual Sensor Network Deployments in Research Studies from 2013 to 2017

Technologies, such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Internet of Things (IoT), have captured the imagination of researchers, businesses, and general public, due to breakthroughs in embedded system development, sensing technologies, and ubiquitous connectivity in recent years. That resulted in the emergence of an enormous, difficult-to-navigate body of work related to WSN and IoT. In an ongoing research effort to highlight trends and developments in these technologies and to see whether they are actually deployed rather than subjects of theoretical research with presumed potential use cases, we gathered and codified a dataset of scientific publications from a five-year period from 2013 to 2017 involving actual sensor network deployments, which will serve as a basis for future in-depth analysis of the field. In the first iteration, 15,010 potentially relevant articles were identified in SCOPUS and Web of Science databases; after two iterations, 3059 actual sensor network deployments were extracted from those articles and classified in a consistent way according to different categories, such as type of nodes, field of application, communication types, etc. We publish the resulting dataset with the intent that its further analysis may identify prospective research fields and future trends in WSN and IoT.

Teaching Reform and Innovation of Embedded System Development in the Context of Artificial Intelligence

Embedded system is a special computer application system embedded in the object system. It is a combination of software and hardware. After decades of development, embedded systems have gradually entered many important industries such as industrial production, military, aerospace, transportation, wireless communications, and consumer electronics products, and their applications are extensive. The diversity of embedded systems has driven the rapid development of the embedded product market. In this paper, we analyze the teaching reform of embedded system development from the perspective of artificial intelligence. The sample models are integrated to help understand the proposed methodology. The numerical analysis proves the novelty.

Real time embedded system development for missile angular position acquisition through image processing

In recent days, our Indian nation moves towards “Make in India” and “Digital India” concepts. To make those concepts go live, the proposal aims at the development of an indigenous embedded system for the real time acquisition of the missile position when it is ready to be launched. The system to be developed will also communicate from the Missile Launch vehicle to the control center. It displays the position of the missile in addition to its video stream displayed on the operator’s console in control center. An extensive algorithm to calculate the angular position of the missile using the video streams captured from three different cameras will be formulated. The possibilities of real-time implementation will be explored and an extensive effort on developing a framework to implement using Field programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) will be carried out. The final outcome of this work will be the system on programmable chip (SoPC) implementation using FPGA for video streams, angular position display of the missile and Wireless communication between Missile launch vehicle and operator’s console in the Control center. This entire module will ensure the reliability of the angular position at which the missile has to be launched and also compactness can be achieved since the conventional computing systems will be replaced by FPGAs.

Development of embedded system in monitoring temperature and humidity as supporting smart farm

Enabling the environment is an important factor in developing livestock business. The temperature and humidity of the cage are very important aspects to consider. Inappropriate livestock cage temperature can affect livestock productivity and survival. The purpose of this research is to design a web-based temperature and humidity monitoring system, in the form of automatic regulation and measurement. In this research, embedded systems techniques are applied to build temperature monitoring systems by combining sensors and microcontrollers. Monitoring the temperature and humidity conditions of the enclosure is done through a sensor network and the classification of conditions is carried out by an intelligent system that produces web-based decision support. The sensor used to measure temperature and humidity in this monitoring system is the DHT22 sensor, while the controller is used NodeMCU. The results of this study are measurement data can be displayed on web pages that can be accessed in realtime. NodeMCU devices can be used as controllers for temperature and humidity data and successfully send data to a database that can be displayed on the website interface. Monitoring humidity and temperature is a great and easy way to record and track any changes which can help decision-makers to prepare or follow suit procedures to prevent conditions that can cause livestock.

C++20 Coroutines on Microcontrollers—What We Learned

Coroutines will be added to C++ as part of the C++20 standard. Coroutines provide native language support for asynchronous operations. This letter evaluates the C++ coroutine specification from the perspective of embedded systems developers. We find that the proposed language features are generally beneficial, but that memory management of the coroutine state needs to be improved. Our experiments on an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller evaluate the time and memory costs of coroutines in comparison with alternatives, and we show that context switching with coroutines is significantly faster than with thread-based real-time operating systems. Furthermore, we analyzed the impact of these language features on prototypical Internet of Things sensor software. We find that the proposed language enhancements potentially bring significant benefits to programming in C++ for embedded computers, but that the implementation imposes constraints that may prevent its widespread acceptance among the embedded development community.