Host PC Research Articles

Python to accelerate embedded SoC design

We present SysPy (System Python) a tool which exploits the strengths of the popular Python scripting language to boost design productivity of embedded System on Chips for FPGAs. SysPy acts as a “glue” software between mature HDLs, ready-to-use VHDL components and programmable processor soft IP cores. SysPy can be used to: (i) automatically translate hardware components described in Python into synthesizable VHDL, (ii) capture top-level structural descriptions of processor-centric SoCs in Python, (iii) implement all the steps necessary to compile the user's C code for an instruction set processor core and generate processor specific Tcl scripts that import to the design project all the necessary HDL files of the processor's description and instantiate/connect the core to other blocks in a synthesizable top-level Python description. Moreover, we have developed a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) in Python which allows user applications running in a host PC to utilize effortlessly the SoC's resources in the FPGA. SysPy's design capabilities, when complemented with the developed HAL software API, provide all the necessary tools for hw/sw partitioning and iterative design for efficient SoC's performance tuning. We demonstrate how SysPy's design flow and functionalities can be used by building a processor-centric embedded SoC for computational systems biology. The designed SoC, implemented using a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA, combines the flexibility of a programmable soft processor core (Leon3) with the high performance of an application specific core to simulate flexibly and efficiently the stochastic behavior of large size biomolecular reaction networks. Such networks are essential for studying the dynamics of complex biological systems consisting of multiple interacting pathways.

Piston Data Telemetry in Internal Combustion Engines

Measuring piston crown temperature and pressure during engine development cycle is paramount. This paper presents a new development in short distance telemetry system which includes an on board power generation device. A mechatronic data acquisition system is developed whereby signal conditioning is performed by a module inside the piston and the signal passed to a Bluetooth transmitter module for wireless telemetry to a Bluetooth receiver located in very close proximity, connected to an external host PC. The Data Acquisition Bluetooth module integrates a microcontroller that reads the conditioned sensor signal and performs any other required functionality. The microcontroller firmware includes a server that collates the data and transmits them via Bluetooth to the host PC to display via a client interface. An independent power supply consisting of a rotor incorporating NdFeB magnets and a wire wound stator. As the crankshaft rotates the rotor induces an AC voltage into the stator. A rectifying circuit converts the AC voltage into a regulated DC output voltage that drives the signal conditioning and embedded Bluetooth circuits.

Model-in-the-loop simulation of gap and torque tracking control using electronic wedge brake actuator

This paper presents gap and torque tracking controls of a new braking system for Brake-by-Wire (BBW) using a wedging mechanism. A validation technique known as Model-in-the-Loop Simulation (MILS) is proposed to evaluate the effectiveness of EWB actuator and model. MILS is divided into two types of techniques, which are Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation (HILS) using real EWB actuator and Software-in-the-Loop Simulation (SILS) using Gaussian cumulative distribution technique. A brake test rig is developed for HILS using EWB actuator, Electronic Control Unit, National Instrument board, xPC Host and Target PC. Meanwhile, mathematical equations are developed for SILS using Matlab Simulink. Both techniques are used to evaluate the performance of EWB actuator and EWB’s mathematical model in controlling the gap and torque using various inputs. The results show that the responses from the actuator and EWB model closely followed the desired trajectories, indicating that EWB is capable to be used for vehicle active braking.

Energy Efficient Output Regulation with Adaptive Behaviour in a DC-DC UPS

Abstract This paper presents an embeddable and highly customizable DC to DC UPS module in a novel and lightweight approach comparing to dozens of existing semi-industrial grade AC and DC UPS devices. Majority of them are following nearly the same, less flexible and less energy efficient scheme, operating on fixed battery type, fixed output voltage and having a featureless USB link to the host PC. In our vision energy efficiency is critical to achieve maximum performance at output without even moderate energy losses. This is even more important in case of an embeddable UPS device which needs to act as much “transparent” as it could in terms of energy efficiency reported to the primary energy source. This is mostly the main definition of our research area. Thus the main goal is to increase efficiency even with the cost of output precision but in the allowed domain of accepted input voltage range of the powered system. Our proposal, a combination of a mid range RISC MCU and a customizable AFE, power path controller and coulomb counter could result in a simpler but more efficient power converting device, even using low priced, less performing components (digital potentiometers and MOSFETs) where the control software could overcome many of the performance issues by algorithms.

Track L: miscellaneous.

The measurement of the pulse wave has proven to be a vital tool in medical diagnosis. Whereby most pulse wave measurements are carried out at extremities, this work proposes a system for measuring the pulse wave and the Pulse Arrival Time (PAT) in the interior of the ear. The developed measurement device is based on a battery powered microcontroller system. The measurement device simultaneously acquires an Einthoven Lead II Electrocardiogram (ECG), a dual wavelength Photoplethysmogram (PPG), the pressure in both ears, the temperature inside the ear canal, as well as the subject's motion. The acquired measurement data can either be saved on a micro SD-card or can be transmitted wireless via Bluetooth or wired via USB to a host PC for further analysis. Battery powered the device can operate up to 8 hours. In addition to the system description, first measurements carried out with the system will be presented.

Design of Pulse Magnetron Sputtering Deposition Control System Based on Multifunction Controller

A new design technique about pulse magnetron sputtering control system Which bases on multifunction controller and automatic control theory is proposed. This system includes a host PC, a gust multifunctional controller and the local instruments. It controls the process of films deposition automatically and it is also composed of three models corresponding for different operational requests. The characteristic of sputtering deposition films shows the steadily and effectively advantages in this technique.

Remote Update on Flash-Based Hydrologic Remote Terminal through GPRS Technology

Mountain torrent is one of major natural disasters for humans. With the development of the Internet of things, the instrumented terminals, through which the host PC could obtain the real-time water and rainfall information and could alert to a coming disaster, have been widely applied to mountain torrent warning system. In order to ensure the effectiveness of network alerting, the program in the terminals need to be updated for some specific situations, but large quantities of terminals are usually built in complex terrain and fragmented geographically, so that it is difficult and expensive to update or repair the programs. In this paper, a method of remote update, realized on the BAM-4300 hydrologic remote terminal to update the complex programs via GPRS modules, was highly reliable. Experiments show that this method is of safety and reliability, and cumbersome processes of onsite update and maintenance could be avoided.

Laser Far-Field Spot Test System

Measurement of the energy distribution of laser spots is an effective way in characterizing and diagnosing laser beam quality. After comparing conventional direct-detection and indirect-detection methods, a novel direct-detection scheme, which is based on detector-array controlled by single-chip microprocessors, is proposed. On the basis of analyzing key technologies such as data transmission and optical-electrical conversion, a block diagram of the system is proposed. In this system, a distributed structure was adopted which was composed of a host PC, a main microprocessor and lower microprocessors. This system is capable of measuring the parameters of laser beam in outfield such as size and shape of the spot, the energy of pulse and its distribution etc. It is suitable for most of lasers with repetition rate ranging from single pulse to several hundred per second and different energy up to moderate-high level. The system is more accurate than any former systems.

Daisy-chain Shape Wearable Health Monitoring System by Using Fuzzy Logic Heart-Rate Extraction

Continuous human monitoring will be substantially useful to realize a high quality of life society. In the previous work, we fabricated a prototype system for monitoring an electrocardiograph, heart rate (HR), 3 axes human body acceleration and temperature for human body and human circumstances, simultaneously. These data are transmitted to the host PC and analyzed for the human activities or conditions recognitions. Above all a heart rate variability (HRV) that calculated from HR is extremely valuable for recognizing a mental or physical stress of human subjects. In this study, we demonstrate a fuzzy logic HR extraction algorithm on the daisy chain shaped wearable prototype device to realize an autonomous HRV monitoring system. On-board fuzzy logic algorithm not only reduces the communication traffic but also improves an accuracy of the HR extraction comparing to the simple threshold methods.

Multi-Energy X-Ray Imaging System Using Single Photon Counting

High-performance computing capability enabled the development of a multi-energy X-ray imaging system which includes a data-acquisition, pre-processing and transmission module, followed by image reconstruction module. The data acquisition, pre-processing and transmission module are located at the pixel sensor side, and the image reconstruction is completed by using a GPGPU on a host PC. Thus, it requires a high-speed communication channel between the sensor side and the host PC. In this paper, we introduce our prototype multi-energy X-ray system focusing on the data acquisition, pre-processing, and transmission module. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal to the single photon counting X-ray system.

Implementation and extension of a GNU-Radio RFID reader

Abstract. The development of a flexible software defined RFID is discused. Commercial reader systems only allow a top level view on the communication and restrict the variation for many transmission parameters. Recently a software reader from the CGran project was proposed which uses the GNU Radio environment in combination with an USRP front end. Because most of the signal processing is done on a common host PC, this reader offers high flexibility, but also has several disadvantages. One of the main hardware limitations is the usage of only one separated antenna per transmit and receive path. Commercial readers usually use four antennas which are time multiplexed and can be used as transmitter and receiver. In this work a HF multiplexer for the USRP device is introduced. With this extension up to four transmit and receive antennas can be used in combination with the software reader. It is shown that the multiplexer achieves good read rates for a switching interval of 100 ms. Using this multiplexer the read range of the system decrease compared to the basic software reader, but distances over two meters can still be realized without additional hardware extensions.

Environmental parameter monitoring using wireless sensor network

The paper presents the design and deployment of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) for monitoring environmental parameters. The system measures air temperature, relative humidity, solar radiation and barometric pressure. The system consists of a base station and a wireless sensor node. WSN ethernet gateway attached to a host PC serves as the base station in the network. WSN measurement node with necessary sensors and signal conditioners serves as the wireless sensor node. The wireless sensor node measures the parameters and transfers the data to the base station. An application program has been developed on LabVIEW platform and executed in the host PC for data acquisition, processing, and plotting of the measurement data on a graphical chart. The program also saves the data in a file for history review and analysis. Hardware and software development of the system are discussed. Typical measurements with the present system are reported.

Development of Building Material Monitoring and Management System Based on W5200 and C8051F060

In this paper, an universal building material monitoring and management system is designed based on C8051F060 SOC and W5200. In the hardware section, the general characteristics of C8051F060 and W5200 is described, the system architecture of management system for monitoring of building materials is represented, the hardware circuit design of the measurement system is described in detail, a problem frequently encountered in using W5200 is elaborated and a feasible solution is given. In the software part, the data acquisition software on the C8051F060 MCU and the monitoring and management software on the host PC are introduced. The implemented system has many functions, including parameter calibration, data acquisition, data display, data transfer and so on.

Optimizing Storage Performance for VM-Based Mobile Computing

This article investigates the transient use of free local storage for improving performance in VM-based mobile computing systems implemented as thick clients on host PCs. We use the term TransientPC systems to refer to these types of systems. The solution we propose, called TransPart , uses the higher-performing local storage of host hardware to speed up performance-critical operations. Our solution constructs a virtual storage device on demand (which we call transient storage ) by borrowing free disk blocks from the host’s storage. In this article, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a TransPart prototype, which requires no modifications to the software or hardware of a host computer. Experimental results confirm that TransPart offers low overhead and startup cost, while improving user experience.

Systems-on-chip approach for real-time simulation of wheel–rail contact laws

This paper presents the development of a systems-on-chip approach to speed up the simulation of wheel–rail contact laws, which can be used to reduce the requirement for high-performance computers and enable simulation in real time for the use of hardware-in-loop for experimental studies of the latest vehicle dynamic and control technologies. The wheel–rail contact laws are implemented using a field programmable gate array (FPGA) device with a design that substantially outperforms modern general-purpose PC platforms or fixed architecture digital signal processor devices in terms of processing time, configuration flexibility and cost. In order to utilise the FPGA's parallel-processing capability, the operations in the contact laws algorithms are arranged in a parallel manner and multi-contact patches are tackled simultaneously in the design. The interface between the FPGA device and the host PC is achieved by using a high-throughput and low-latency Ethernet link. The development is based on FASTSIM algorithms, although the design can be adapted and expanded for even more computationally demanding tasks.

ZigBee- based Wireless Electronic Scale and its Network Performance Analysis for the Application of Smart Billing System in Super Markets

There is the greatest demand for electronic weighing scale in vegetable shops, health industries and especially to measure the tiny things. This paper proposes a Wireless electronic weighing scale designed using ultra low power MSP430 controller and with ZigBee wireless communication module. The weighing scale measures the weight with the help of strain sensor and the processor, which has an inbuilt FRAM memory and Real time clock and calendar. This makes the scale to update the weighing databases more accurately and instruction with host PC in a wireless manner. The ZigBee cluster tree network is formed to communicate with more than one electronic scale and the network performance is analyzed using NetSim. The Visual Basic language is developed for user interface in PC side for generating bills.

The MiniPET: a didactic PET system

The MiniPET project aims to design and build a small PET system. It consists of two 4 × 4 matrices of 16 LYSO scintillator crystals and two PMTs with 16 channels resulting in a low cost system with the essential functionality of a clinical PET instrument. It is designed to illustrate the physics of the PET technique and to provide a didactic platform for the training of students and nuclear imaging professionals as well as for scientific outreach. The PET modules can be configured to test for the coincidence of 511 keV gamma rays. The model has a flexible mechanical setup [1] and can simulate 14 diferent ring geometries, from a configuration with as few as 18 detectors per ring (ring radius ϕ=51 mm), up to a geometry with 70 detectors per ring (ϕ=200 mm). A second version of the electronic system [2] allowed measurement and recording of the energy deposited in 4 detector channels by photons from a 137Cs radioactive source and by photons resulting of the annihilation of positrons from a 22Na radioactive source. These energy spectra are used for detector performance studies, as well as angular dependency studies. In this paper, the mechanical setup, the front-end high-speed analog electronics, the digital acquisition and control electronics implemented in a FPGA, as well as the data-transfer interface between the FPGA board and a host PC are described. Recent preliminary results obtained with the 4 active channels in the prototype are also presented.

Design and Implementation of a High Temperature Control Monitoring Applied to Micro Thermoelectric Generators

The present paper describes the design and the implementation of a high temperature control monitoring (HTCM) for investigating the characteristics of a new type of thermoelectric generator (TEG) materials. This new material should work with temperature difference up to 400 K, while most common TEGs using tellurium material operate with temperature differences up to 200 K, and cannot withstand temperatures higher than 473 K. In order to perform exact temperature control, the thermal power supplied to the HTCM and to regulate the temperature difference on TEG, a mathematical model of digitalized linear AC voltage phase switching was worked out and implemented in the developed device. This model makes it possible to achieve the exact accuracy of temperature control through the digital control of AC voltage phase switching. During the TEG performance measurement process the developed HTCM keeps the TEG hot side at the specified temperature, while the cold side is holding on constant temperature of approximately 293 K. The HTCM embedded system was developed in order to test new TEG materials by specified high temperature ranges and to acquire and transmit data to an online host PC.

A TDC for the characterization of KM3NeT PMTs

The optical modules of the future KM3NeT neutrino telescope will contain many photomultiplier tubes with a diameter of about 3in. In order to characterize these photomultiplier tubes, a 16 channel Time-Over-Threshold TDC with a GigaBit Ethernet communication channel has been built in an Altera StratixIV evaluation board. The TDC data is packed in UDP packages and sent to the host PC. Control is implemented using I2C command packages send to the TDC by the host PC. After execution of I2C commands a result package is send back to the host. We will present the TDC setup and first results.

IPv6-Based Smart Metering Network for Monitoring Building Electricity

A smart electricity monitoring system of building is presented using ZigBee and internet to establish the network. This system consists of three hardware layers: the host PC, the router, and the sensor nodes. A hierarchical ant colony algorithm is developed for data transmission among the wireless sensor nodes. The wireless communication protocol is also designed based on IPv6 protocol on IEEE 802.15.4 wireless network. All-IP approach and peer-to-peer mode are integrated to optimize the network building. Each node measures the power, current, and voltage and transmits them to the host PC through the router. The host software is designed for building test characteristics, having a tree hierarchy and a friendly interface for the user. The reliability and accuracy of this monitoring system are verified in the experiment and application.