Hardware Interface Design Research Articles

Design of UAV Flight Control System

In order to improve the control performance of UAV. For a small UAV, the hardware design scheme of UAV flight control computer with STM32 as the processing core is proposed and implemented. The overall scheme design, specific hardware selection and interface design of the system are given in detail. STM32, as the main controller, expands the parallel A/D, D/A, asynchronous serial communication interface and memory around, enriches the system hardware interface resources, and selects the peripheral expansion circuit with complex programmable logic controller (CPID) to realize interrupt control. This flight control computer has the characteristics of small volume and strong autonomous navigation ability.

The Effect of Hand-Held Technology on Thumb Biomechanics

The rise of portable units calls attention to the impact of device design and it challenges to biomechanical capabilities of the thumb and increased musculoskeletal discomfort. The purpose of this critiqued article, therefore, is to understand the significance of thumb biomechanics on hand-held technology and upper extremity pain. Healthy sixteen right-handed participants (21-40 years) performed a multitude of swiping gestures with the thumb of their right hand on 8’’ and 10’’ tablets (Samsung Galaxy III). The swiping gestures differed in swipe direction (outward v. inward), swipe orientation (horizontal v. vertical), swipe location (4 swipe zones), and swipe length (short v. long). Data was acquired using a custom Android application, thumb/wrist posture and forearm muscle activity was quantified using three-dimensional motion analysis and surface electromyograph, respectively. Data was analyzed using repeated measures of ANOVA. Self-reported perceived wrist and hand discomfort was measured using a visual analogue scale after each trial. Swiping actions closest to the palm rendered less pain, decreased forearm muscle activity, neutral thumb biomechanics and wrist posture. The left zones had greatest metacarpal (16) and carpometacarpal abduction (10) and topmost wrist movement, ulnar deviation (18) and extension (14) (Table 1), compared to the right zones. Regarding tablet orientation, portrait mode of both devices amassed more muscle activity related to landscape mode. The limits of upper extremities and thumb biomechanics can be seen in specific swipe locations of hand-held technology. The p-values for wrist extension (p < 0.01) and ulnar deviation (p < 0.03) on tablet size and orientation quantitatively illustrate the poor wrist posture commonly adopted by users under these conditions. Swipe zone results proved users had best performance and lower discomfort rates when gestures were performed near the palm. Carpometacarpal abduction data found high joint angles during trials on the left side of the tablet and no movement (0) on the right side. This constant biomechanical exertion to swipe in out-of-reach areas may lead to musculoskeletal disorders or pain. The results suggest tablet hardware and user interface design to allow for neutral thumb and wrist posture while accounting for decreased muscle demands. The purpose of the study was to identify the effect of hand-held technology on thumb biomechanics, thumb/wrist posture, and forearm muscle activity. The findings demonstrated increased user performance and lower musculoskeletal pain while performing gestures closer to the palm. The authors’ ability to pinpoint the specific location where users experienced greatest extension, abduction, pain, and forearm muscle activation (top left zone) was one of the articles supreme strengths. Nonetheless, the study should be considered within context of its limitations. A limitation within the experiment was the criteria to be a participant. The study did not inquire about the amount of time users usually spent on their device in a normal week, this may give evidence to the biomechanical loads their thumb and upper extremities are accustomed to. A suggestion for research design is to improve participant criterion. Users thumb strength can be quantified with the pinch test or examined through manual muscle tests to indicate a correlation between thumb strength and participant perception of fatigue post-trial(s).

Examining Usage to Ensure Utility: Co-Design of a Tool for Fall Prevention

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies can play an important role in helping elderly people achieve healthy ageing and maintain their autonomy. The balance quality tester (BQT) is a device for remote assessment of balance quality for older people at risk of falling. It has been validated both from a technical and a clinical perspective. However, for the BQT to be considered as a useful tool for long-term home monitoring of people with balance impairments, two issues are at stake: ease-of-use on a regular basis and trust in the validity of the data acquisition. To ensure this utility, a usage study has been made to understand the needs and values of different stakeholders: elders at risk of falling and their entourage, as well as health professionals. One main insight was the need to redesign the BQT, so as to fit the needs concerning ease-of-use and trust in validity of data acquisition. Using a Human-centred and Participatory Design approach, the redesigning work relates to hardware design, interaction design, interface design, and most of all to standardizing the protocol of stepping-on the BQT. This paper describes the main results, i.e. the design recommendations, and discusses the collaborative and iterative design process, which allowed the successful redesign of the BQT.

High-performance small- and wide-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS/WAXS) experiments on a multi-functional laboratory goniometer platform with easily exchangeable X-ray modules

Small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) is a well-established, versatile technique for the analysis of nanoscale structures and dimensions, e.g., in liquid dispersions, thin solid objects or powder samples. When combined with wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS), complementary information about the atomic structure can be obtained. SAXS experiments traditionally require dedicated instruments to achieve the desired angular resolution, sensitivity, stability, and speed of measurement. Here we demonstrate how a multi-functional laboratory goniometer platform, as widely being used for powder X-ray diffraction and for a variety of related techniques, can be configured with pre-aligned X-ray modules that enable advanced SAXS/WAXS experiments, without compromising the exceptional versatility of the instrument. Line and point collimation setups, as well as quick and easy switching between them, are readily possible. Key components are a detachable, evacuated beam path and a high-resolution, low-noise hybrid pixel area detector, in combination with a hardware interface design that allows to configure the instrument with different X-ray modules without the need for re-alignment. Software for SAXS data reduction and analysis was developed. The good SAXS/WAXS performance and the derived analytical results were verified on various test samples, such as gold nanoparticles, colloidal silica, liposomes, dilute protein solutions, and solid polymer samples. It is believed that this novel approach to SAXS/WAXS instrumentation will help to make this powerful structure analysis technique more widely accessible and affordable for multi-user laboratories.

The Design of CAN Bus Communication System Based on MCP2515 and S3C2440

CAN bus was widely used in embedded system development, but most embedded processors without CAN bus controller, need to extend external CAN bus interface through external bus. In order to send and receive the CAN bus data by S3C2440 chip, interface function of S3C2440 was extended by MCP2515 chip in the paper, which was used the SPI interface to extend CAN bus interface. The design of CAN bus hardware interface was described in the paper. The design of CAN device drive program on the embedded Linux operating system was specified in detail.

The Design of C8051F120-Based Remote Island Meteorological Measurement System

The measurement of meteorological elements is of great significance in marine environment monitoring. Air pressure and air temperature/humidity are important parts of marine meteorological observation. An application example of the integrated meteorological measurement system composed by new pressure sensor and temperature/humidity sensor in remote island meteorological measurement is introduced, and also the basic characteristics of the two sensors and also the hardware interface design and software control method of microcontroller C8051F120 are described, and finally RS-485 bus interface circuit design and software design as well as its integration method are provided. Practical application proves that this system features high accuracy, low power consumption, convenient maintenance, and high reliability.

Design of Microcontroller System for Surface Scanning of Micro-Steel Ball

Based on the detection requirements of surface and sub-surface of micro steel ball, control system of defect scanning is studied, aiming at the problem of unfolded surface of steel ball, STC89S52 microcontroller is considered as the control core, then the feasible method of speed and direction control of step motor that driven by detection device, and hardware interface circuit and design of software solutions of the system are put forward, principles of unfolded surface of steel ball and control system of defect scanning and signal about defect scanning are analyzed, then the result are verified valid through the experiment. The results indicate that unfolded mechanics could be driven and flawed steel balls could be detected by the system of surface scanning of micro steel ball, which meet the design requirements.

An Implementation of CANopen at Water Electrolysis Hydrogen Generation Station

In this paper, the structure and characteristic of CANopen protocol is analyzed, and the implementation in a Water Electrolysis Hydrogen Generation Station (WEHGS) is described in detail, which includes the hardware interface design of CAN controller based on the ARM7 of LPC2292, and the software implementation. Finally, the practice proved that used CANopen in WEHGS is a good way with real time action, more reliability and low cost.

A Multi-Channel Audio Signal Processing Platform Based on DSP

This paper presented a multi-channel audio signal processing platform based on TMS320VC5509A. It introduced the system basic circuit and the hardware interface design of TLV320AIC23B and TMS320VC5509A. The platform can achieve input four-channel signal and output four-channel simultaneously. Due to its low power consumption, high performance and portable feature, the platform has been used in the system of noise reduction headphone.

Embedded Machine Tool CNC System Based on the ARM and MCX314

CNC(Computer Numerical Control) machine tool is the foundation and core of modern manufacturing systems, advanced CNC technology is the key to sustainable development of machine tool manufacturing industry. This thesis presents ARM as the main chip, motion control chip MCX314, the operating system using μC / OS-II, to build a CNC system development hardware platform and software platform, to explore the new ways for numerical control system development and design. This thesis can be divided into: CNC system hardware platform structures, including ARM and external hardware selection, hardware interface design and testing; MCX314 hardware platform design and testing; Software Platform, including the use of real-time operating system μC / OS-II to achieve the mission of the NC system, scheduling, management, μC / OS-II transplantation on ARM; MCX314 hardware platform building and testing; application framework built , program design and testing. Test results showed that: ARM as the main chip, MCX314 as a motion controller of the CNC system is feasible, its motion performance can meet the design requirements.

An Implementation of Remote Monitor Master Station Based on CANopen Protocol

For the development trends and defects of the Water Electrolysis Hydrogen Generation Station (WEHGS), the design of CAN bus distributed network control system based on CANopen protocol is presented. CANopen master characteristics have been analyzed, then the communication implementation of CANopen monitor msater protocol stack, which includes the hardware interface and software design of CAN controller based on the LPC2292, is described. The tested results show that CANopen monitor master meets the requirements of WEHGS.

A formal technique for hardware interface design

In this paper, we consider the problem of hardware interface design in a codesign approach for real-time digital signal processing (DSP) applications. We refer to the hardware component as ASICS (Applied Specific Integrated Circuits) and the software component as processors. We describe a formal technique to communication synthesis starting from hardware I/O transfer sequences computed by a high level synthesis tool, like GAUT. The original nature of our work is the fact that a communication interface is generated at the same time as the hardware module which leads to better performance and optimization and ensures communication data coherency. Our design strategy starts from the hardware I/O transfer sequences computed by GAUT. It incorporates some interface specification (I/O transfer order, timing constraints) obtained by any cosynthesis tool. The proposed allocation procedure of necessary storage components needed for data communication between hardware-software components assigns for each I/O data a time interval at which its transfer could occur. As an illustration, we present a mixed implementation of the GMDF alpha algorithm, an adaptive filter well suited to acoustic echo cancellation, on both ASIC and TS320C40 DSP.

The early history of Smalltalk

Most ideas come from previous ideas. The sixties, particularly in the ARPA community, gave rise to a host of notions about “human-computer symbiosis” through interactive time-shared computers, graphics screens and pointing devices. Advanced computer languages were invented to simulate complex systems such as oil refineries and semi-intelligent behavior. The soon to follow paradigm shift of modern personal computing, overlapping window interfaces, and object-oriented design came from seeing the work of the sixties as something more than a “better old thing”. That is, more than a better way: to do mainframe computing; for end-users to invoke functionality; to make data structures more abstract. Instead the promise of exponential growth in computing/$/volume demanded that the sixties be regarded as “ almost a new thing” and to find out what the actual “new things” might be. For example, one would compute with a handheld “Dynabook” in a way that would not be possible on a shared mainframe; millions of potential users meant that the user interface would have to become a learning environment along the lines of Montessori and Bruner; and needs for large scope, reduction in complexity, and end-user literacy would require that data and control structures be done away with in favor of a more biological scheme of protected universal cells interacting only through messages that could mimic any desired behavior. Early Smalltalk was the first complete realization of these new points of view as parented by its many predecessors in hardware, language and user interface design. It became the exemplar of the new computing, in part, because we were actually trying for a qualitative shift in belief structures—a new Kuhnian paradigm in the same spirit as the invention of the printing press—and thus took highly extreme positions which almost forced these new styles to be invented.