MSP430 Microcontroller Research Articles

Optical Electric Current Transformer for Monitoring Its Performance in the Substation

The optical electric current transformer (OECT) is an important measuring and protection equipment in the power system. Its accuracy and reliability are vital to the power system’s safe, reliable, and economical operation. Because the energy supply of a high-voltage side data acquisition system is the biggest obstacle in developing this kind of transformer, a low-power data acquisition system of OECT is designed from cost, reliability, accuracy, and practicability. In the design process, the low-power microcontroller MSP430 produced by TI company is used for control. Its rich on-chip and off-chip function modules and ultra-low power performance meet the system’s requirements. The 16-bit low-power high-speed chip ADS8325 is used as an A/D converter to ensure the instantaneity and accuracy of data acquisition and the low-power characteristics of the system. The optical fiber digital transmission system is utilized to achieve high/low voltage electrical isolation, and the low-power optical fiber transmission drive circuit is devised. After the main hardware design is completed, the software is adjusted and used in the electric energy monitoring of the substation. The test shows that the error of three-phase current and three-phase voltage is less than 2%. After setting the voltage amplitude, current amplitude, and power factor, the error of its active and reactive power is less than 2% after electric energy monitoring. After multiple harmonic tests, the measurement errors of voltage harmonics and current harmonics are smaller than 5%, that is, the measurement results of each index achieve high measurement accuracy.

Design and research of wireless optical power meter based on IoT big data and physical quantity

In response to the problems of low accuracy, high radiation, and high power consumption in industrial UV power detection, the author proposes a design scheme based on a low-power microcontroller MSP430 as the core controller, two UV photoelectric sensors as detectors, and wireless LoRa as the data transmission method. This scheme adopts dual sensors and achieves photoelectric conversion and ambient light filtering through a subtractive amplification circuit. It also uses high-precision programmable AD acquisition chips to achieve controllable amplification of the signal and convert analog signals into digital quantities for transmission to the main controller MSP430. The improved sliding average filtering method is used to perform digital filtering on the collected data and calculate the corresponding power value, data is transmitted to the upper computer for real-time display through wireless Lora. Research and experiments have shown that the dual sensors have a good agreement with the standard values. The difference between the measured values after digital filtering and the standard values is small, and the linearity of digital filtering is good. It can be seen from the two figures that the higher the power value, the higher the lighting temperature. It has been proven that the entire system operates stably, with high accuracy, low power consumption, and can remotely and real-time detect changes in ultraviolet light power. It can be widely used in the field of industrial ultraviolet light detection.

Information Monitoring of Transmission Lines Based on Internet of Things Technology

To solve the problem of difficult real-time monitoring of current transmission lines, this article proposes an information-based monitoring system for transmission lines based on Internet of Things technology. The system utilizes the characteristics of strong scalability, good fault tolerance, low power consumption, and low cost of the Internet of Things. Taking the ultra-low power consumption MSP430 microcontroller and CC2430 radio frequency module as the core, a line monitoring system based on the Internet of Things is designed. The proposed design uses ZigBee wireless sensor network technology which is powered by solar energy. The collection, transmission, processing and judgment of various environmental parameters of the line are realized. The data information is transferred to the monitoring center of the upper computer through GPRS. When there is an abnormality, it can send a mobile phone short message to the person in charge to feedback the abnormal content in time. The distribution network's load symmetry allowed for the development of several locating procedures. For the three-phase symmetric scheme, the fault location approach based on line supply characteristics was employed, and for the three-phase asymmetric scheme, the fault location technique based on line impedance is proposed. One of the most vital uses for the Internet of Things is in the mitigation of power transmission line failures and disasters. Improved power transmission dependability, less financial loss, and fewer power outages are all possible thanks to the Internet of Things' cutting-edge sensing and communication technology. This research introduced the use of IoT in online monitoring system of electricity transmission line with a focus on the characteristics of the construction and development of smart grid. The results indicated that the system's highest temperature difference is 0.31 C, while the maximum humidity difference is 1.38%. The system increases the safety and manageability of electricity transmission while also fostering the widespread adoption and technical integration of the smart grid and the Internet of Things.

Side-Channel Resistant 2048-Bit RSA Implementation for Wireless Sensor Networks and Internet of Things

We present a practical realization of Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) with a 2048-bit key on MSP430, a widely used microcontroller in wireless sensor network and Internet of things applications, and show that 2048-bit RSA is feasible on a constrained microcontroller. We exploit several methods for acceleration, e.g. Montgomery modular multiplication, subtractive Karatsuba-Ofman and Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) based modular exponentiation, and achieve RSA encryption and decryption with a 2048-bit key on MSP430 in just 0.14 s and 7.56 s, respectively. Our implementation on the low-end MSP430 microcontroller achieves 2048-bit RSA significantly faster (×2.9 and ×2.4 for encryption and decryption) with respect to the existing implementation in the literature on the comparable ATmega128 microcontroller. While our implementation is secure against the brute force attack due to its 2048-bit key, and thus 112-bit security level, it also includes the necessary side-channel countermeasures, e. g. message and key blinding, to help mitigate implementation attacks such as simple power analysis and differential power analysis.

DEVELOPMENT OF FUNCTIONAL ELEMENTS FOR THE ELECTRONIC DESIGNER «TAPANDA»

Expanding the capabilities of intelligent electronic designers and reducing the cost of production of various functional elements for them is an urgent scientific and practical task. The aim of the work was to develop smart elements of an electrical circuit on the MSP430 microcontroller, simulating the operation of various electronic components, for the circuit designer «Tapanda». The firmware for the microcontroller has been developed and tested, printed circuit boards and front panels of various elements of the electrical circuit of the controlled devices have been designed. Based on the results of the work, a package of design documentation was formed for the production of the developed functional elements.

TempMesh – A Flexible Wireless Sensor Network for Monitoring River Temperatures

For a Chinook salmon restoration project in the lower Yuba River in California, we designed and deployed a wireless sensor network to monitor river temperatures at micro-habitat scales. The study required that temperatures be measured along a 3 km study reach, across the channel, and into off-channel areas. To capture diel and seasonal fluctuations, sensors were sampled quarter-hourly for the full duration of the six-month juvenile salmon winter residency. This sampling duration required that nodes minimize power-use. We adopted event-based software on MSP430 micro-controllers with 433 MHz radio and minimized the networking duty-cycle. To address link failures, we included network storage. As the network lacked real-time clocks, data were timestamped at the destination. This, coupled with the storage, yielded timestamp inaccuracies, which we re-aligned using a novel algorithm. We collected over six months of temperature data from 35 sensors across seven nodes. Of the packets collected, we identified 21% as being incorrectly timestamped and were able to re-align 41% of these incorrectly timestamped packets. We collected temperature data through major floods, and the network uploaded data until the flood destroyed the sensors. The network met an important need in ecological sampling with ultra-low power (multi-year battery life) and low-throughput.

Quad-Mag board for CubeSat applications

Abstract. The design, characteristics, and performance of a CubeSat magnetometer board (Quad-Mag) equipped with four PNI RM3100 magnetometers is presented. The low size, weight, power, and cost of the RM3100 enables the inclusion of four sensors on a single board, allowing a potential factor of 2 reduction in the noise floor established for an individual sensor via oversampling with multiple sensors. The instrument experimentally achieved a noise floor of 5.34 nT (individual axis), averaging across each axis of the four magnetometers, at a 65 Hz sampling rate. This approaches the theoretically established limit for the system of 4.37 nT at 40 Hz. A single onboard Texas Instrument MSP430 microcontroller handles synchronization of the magnetometers and facilitates data collection through a simple UART-based command interface to a host system. The Quad-Mag system has a mass of 59.05 g and total power consumption of 23 mW while sampling and 14 mW while idle. The Quad-Mag enables nearly 1 nT magnetic field measurements at 1 Hz using commercial off-the-shelf sensors for space applications under optimal conditions.

Evaluation of fault injection tools for reliability estimation of microprocessor-based embedded systems

Statistical fault injection is widely used to estimate the reliability of mission-critical microprocessor-based systems when exposed to radiation and to evaluate the performance of fault mitigation strategies. However, further research is needed to gain a better understanding of the accuracy of the results and the feasibility of their application under realistic radiation conditions. In this article, an understanding of scenarios in which Instruction Set Architecture simulators or emulators may be relied upon for realistic statistical fault injection campaigns is advanced. An analysis is presented of the results from two simulation-based fault injection tools versus a set of fault emulation results on a real processor. The conclusions of the analysis assist the selection of the most efficient tool and method for testing many different software-based fault mitigation techniques within reasonable time periods and at affordable costs throughout an irradiation campaign. In particular, it was established that a partially ordered set of relations could be defined on the basis of statistical fault injection in relation to the effects of different versions of an application and a given simulator that remained unaltered during the irradiation experiments. The tests were conducted with a Texas Instruments MSP430 microcontroller to perform both fault injection campaigns and irradiation experiments using neutrons at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) Weapons Neutron Research Facility at Los Alamos, USA.

FFT enabled ECC for WSN nodes without hardware multiplier support

ECC is a popular cryptographic algorithm for key distribution in wireless sensor networks where power efficiency is desirable. A power efficient implementation of ECC without using hardware multiplier support was proposed earlier for wireless sensor nodes. The proposed implementation utilized the number theoretic transform to carry operands to the frequency domain, and conducted Montgomery multiplication, in addition to other finite field operations, in that domain. With this work, we perform in the frequency domain only polynomial multiplication and use the fast Fourier transform to carry operands between the time and frequency domains. Our ECC implementation over $GF((2^{13}-1)^{13})$ on the MSP430 microcontroller implements multiplications without using a hardware multiplier. It achieves scalar multiplication with fixed and random points in only 0.89 s and 1.74 s, respectively. Our implementation achieves ECC point multiplication of fixed and random points $10\%$ and $13\%$ faster, and consuming $12\%$ and $15\%$ less energy, in comparison to the existing work.

Development of a Datalogger for Submarine Glider: Integration of Fault-Tolerant Software Layers

Submarine gliders are specialized systems used in applications such as environmental monitoring of marine fauna, in the oil industry, among others. The glider launch and capture is a costly process that requires substantial technological and human resources, so the orderly and error-free storage of data is of fundamental importance due to the subsequent analysis. The amount of information being obtained from the seabed is increasing, this leads to the need to develop robust and low-cost ad-hocsystems for this type of application. The challenge is the integration of the different software layers in the storage system because the monitored variables must be ordered according to different glider operations such as calibration data update and navigation. Additionally, to avoid data corruption in the memory chip, error control coding must be used. The goal of this paper is to present a novel design of different layers of software integrated into a datalogger: reception, error control, and storage logic for the different glider operations. The design of the datalogger is based on a NAND flash memory chip and an MSP430 microcontroller. To correct bit-flipping errors, a BCH code that corrects 4 errors for every 255 bits is implemented into the microcontroller. The design and evaluation are performed for different glider operations, and for different lengths and correction capabilities of the BCH module. A test to calculate the storage time has been carried out. This test shows that in the case of 256 bytes per sample, at 30 samples per minute, and 1 GB of storage capacity, it is possible to collect data from the glider sensors for 84 days. The results obtained show that our device is a useful option for storing underwater sensor data due to its real-time storage, power consumption, small size, easy integration, and its reliability, where the bit error rate BER is of 2.4 ×10−11.

Compact Implementation of ARIA on 16-Bit MSP430 and 32-Bit ARM Cortex-M3 Microcontrollers

In this paper, we propose the first ARIA block cipher on both MSP430 and Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) microcontrollers. To achieve the optimized ARIA implementation on target embedded processors, core operations of ARIA, such as substitute and diffusion layers, are carefully re-designed for both MSP430 (Texas Instruments, Dallas, TX, USA) and ARM Cortex-M3 microcontrollers (STMicroelectronics, Geneva, Switzerland). In particular, two bytes of input data in ARIA block cipher are concatenated to re-construct the 16-bit wise word. The 16-bit word-wise operation is executed at once with the 16-bit instruction to improve the performance for the 16-bit MSP430 microcontroller. This approach also optimizes the number of required registers, memory accesses, and operations to half numbers rather than 8-bit word wise implementations. For the ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller, the 8×32 look-up table based ARIA block cipher implementation is further optimized with the novel memory access. The memory access is finely scheduled to fully utilize the 3-stage pipeline architecture of ARM Cortex-M3 microcontrollers. Furthermore, the counter (CTR) mode of operation is more optimized through pre-computation techniques than the electronic code book (ECB) mode of operation. Finally, proposed ARIA implementations on both low-end target microcontrollers (MSP430 and ARM Cortex-M3) achieved (209 and 96 for 128-bit security level, respectively), (241 and 111 for 192-bit security level, respectively), and (274 and 126 for 256-bit security level, respectively). Compared with previous works, the running timing on low-end target microcontrollers (MSP430 and ARM Cortex-M3) is improved by (92.20% and 10.09% for 128-bit security level, respectively), (92.26% and 10.87% for 192-bit security level, respectively), and (92.28% and 10.62% for 256-bit security level, respectively). The proposed ARIA–CTR implementation improved the performance by 6.6% and 4.0% compared to the proposed ARIA–ECB implementations for MSP430 and ARM Cortex-M3 microcontrollers, respectively.

Design of a current switching system for high accuracy current sources in AC-DC Transfer applications

A current switching system for AC-DC transfer applications using Single Junction Thermal Converters (SJTC) was designed and tested at Instituto Nacional de Metrología (INM). This switch design can directly commute between a DC reference current source and an unknown AC current source generated by high accuracy calibrators such as Fluke 5720A and Fluke 5730A. Two vacuum latch relays with an estimated switching speed of less than 10 ms were used. A control unit developed over a MSP430 Microcontroller allowed the switching control and serial communication with instruments through LabVIEW. It was found that, it takes between 2 s and 3 s for high accuracy calibrators to switch between an operating DC current and an AC current, or vice versa; therefore, the current commutation time is limited by the calibrator. By using two calibrators and the implemented current switching system it was possible to reduce the commutation time to about 300 ms, which is less than the reported SJTC thermal time constant. The switching system must be fast enough to avoid the calibrators to go to a standby state. The research work showed that the switching system could be used to improve thermal converters operation for the calibration of high accuracy AC current sources and multimeters.

Accurate Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling Measurement for Low-Power Microcontrollors in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) began to permeate all facets of life thanks to low cost, inherent intelligent-processing capability, simple installation, flexible networking and low energy consumption characteristics. Also, the evaluation of real-world applications on different platforms can solve the implementation problems and contribute to broadening the spectrum of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The purpose of this paper is to reduce the microcontroller's average consumption of a wireless sensor node through architectural and design processes using advanced technologies. This paper provides a state-of-the-art investigation on the most up-to date Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) techniques. A benchmark is given to choose the appropriate DVFS technique according to the type of component, the time and resources constraints, the application requirements, the expected performance level, etc. An energy-saving design is implemented using an ultra-low power microcontroller MSP430 and is based on the DVFS strategy. To efficiently quantify the consumed energy and to ensure more accuracy, a new concept is introduced, which is the normalized power to offer more accuracy. Real voltage/frequency scaling measurement were conducted. We show that a high voltage/frequency can lead to up to 57% increase of the normalized-power.

Empirical Mathematical Model of Microprocessor Sensitivity and Early Prediction to Proton and Neutron Radiation-Induced Soft Errors

A mathematical model is described to predict microprocessor fault tolerance under radiation. The model is empirically trained by combining data from simulated fault-injection campaigns and radiation experiments, both with protons (at the National Center of Accelerators (CNA) facilities, Seville, Spain) and neutrons [at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) Weapons Neutron Research Facility at Los Alamos, USA]. The sensitivity to soft errors of different blocks of commercial processors is identified to estimate the reliability of a set of programs that had previously been optimized, hardened, or both. The results showed a standard error under 0.1, in the case of the Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) processor, and 0.12, in the case of the MSP430 microcontroller.

FTxAC: Leveraging the Approximate Computing Paradigm in the Design of Fault-Tolerant Embedded Systems to Reduce Overheads

The technological scaling has made electronic devices more susceptible to radiation-induced faults. To mitigate these faults, researchers have proposed different techniques at the software, hardware, and hybrid levels. Although some of these techniques are very effective, most of them are based on redundancy, which causes non-negligible computational overheads in terms of area, performance, and power consumption. In this paper, we propose FTxAC, which consists in using approximate computing techniques in conjunction with radiation-induced mitigation strategies for the design of fault-tolerant systems with minimal overheads. Given the nature of the approximate computing paradigm, FTxAC is suitable for error resilient applications. To show the applicability of the proposal, we carry out several case studies with the TI MSP430 microcontroller, in which a set of software-based fault tolerance techniques are used jointly with approximate computing methods to reduce overheads. The experimental results are analyzed in terms of fault coverage, accuracy of the results, and overheads of the several levels of redundancy. Results show that, depending on the level of approximation, the evaluated application, and the fault tolerance strategy employed, the performance of the system can be improved, even counteracting completely the implicit overheads of the redundancy.

Adaptive Speed Control Algorithm for BLDC Motor with Variable Input Source using PSO Algorithm

A sensor less BLDC (Brushless Direct Current) motor speed control is performed using PSO algorithm. The PSO algorithm manages the gain value of the PID controller. The speed of the BLDC motor is provided as the feedback to the controller. The error value is calculated by predetermined speed for the BLDC motor. Wind power generator is used as the input power source for driving BLDC motor. The output power of the wind power generator varies based on the wind speed. The variable input source for the BLDC motor affects the performance of the motor. In order to regulate the input voltage of the BLDC motor, SEPIC DC-DC converter is used. The PSO-PID controller controls the Gate pulse of the SEPIC converter. The model is developed in MATLAB/Simulink, the performance of the proposed PSO-PID control is measured in variable input power condition. The hardware model is developed using MSP430 microcontroller to test the efficiency of the PSO-PID controller in the real time environment.

Using Approximate Computing and Selective Hardening for the Reduction of Overheads in the Design of Radiation-Induced Fault-Tolerant Systems

Fault mitigation techniques based on pure software, known as software-implemented hardware fault tolerance (SIHFT), are very attractive for use in COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) microprocessors because they do not require physical modification of the system. However, these techniques cause software overheads that may affect the efficiency and costs of the overall system. This paper presents a design method of radiation-induced fault-tolerant microprocessor-based systems with lower execution time overheads. For this purpose, approximate computing and selective fault mitigation software-based techniques are used; thus it can be used in COTS devices. The proposal is validated through a case study for the TI MSP430 microcontroller. Results show that the designer can choose among a wide spectrum of design configurations, exploring different trade-offs between reliability, performance, and accuracy of results.

The design of micropower field data collector based on MSP430 microcontroller

Field data collectors are widely used in industrial control and information monitoring. According to the design requirements of micropower consumption and reliability, combined with MSP430 microcontroller, this paper expounds the design scheme of a new type of micropower field data collector, and discusses the overall design of the system and the implementation method of main functional units.

A Novel Active Cell Balancing Circuit and Charging Strategy in Lithium Battery Pack

A novel, active cell balancing circuit and charging strategy in lithium battery pack is proposed in this paper. The active cell balancing circuit mainly consists of a battery voltage measurement circuit and switch control circuit. First, all individual cell voltages are measured by an MSP430 microcontroller equipped with an isolation circuit and a filter circuit. Then, the maximum cell voltage difference is calculated by subtracting the minimum cell voltage from the maximum cell voltage. When the maximum cell voltage difference exceeds 0.05 V, the balancing action starts to carry on. The MSP430 microcontroller output controls signals to close the switches corresponding to the battery cell with the maximum voltage. At this time, the balancing charge power performs a balancing charge for other batteries, except for the one that is switched on. In addition, a three-stage balancing charge strategy is also proposed in this paper to achieve the goal of speedy charging with balancing action. In the first stage, a 0.5 C balancing current is used to perform pre-balanced charging on all battery cells until the maximum cell voltage difference is less than 0.05 V, which is required for entry to the second stage of charging. In the second stage, constant current charging of 1 C, coupled with 0.2 C balancing current charging is carried out, until the maximum battery cell voltage reaches 4.2 V, which is required for entry into the third stage of charging. In the third stage, a constant voltage charging is coupled with 0.2 C balancing current charging, until the maximum battery cell voltage reaches 4.25 V, which is required to complete the balancing charge. The imbalance of power between the battery cells during battery pack charging, which reduces battery charging efficiency and battery life, is thus effectively improved. In this paper, a six-cells-in-series and two-in parallel lithium battery pack is used to perform a balancing charge test. Test results show that the battery cells in the battery pack are capable of quickly completing a balancing charge under different initial voltages, the maximum voltage difference is reduced to within the range of 0.05 V, and the total time required for each balancing charge is approximately 3600 s.

RFID for Everyone: An Easily-Accessible, Experimental UHF RFID Platform

This paper presents an expandable wireless sensing platform designed to exhibit similar functionality to high-performing RFID devices such as the Intel WiSP while remaining accessible as a learning tool. Towards this end, the platform is designed around components that are stocked by most component suppliers, and physically large enough to be soldered by hand. With an aim to bring more researchers into the RFID community, the system allows for a user to quickly perform wireless power transfer experiments, design and test low-power embedded firmware, quickly prototype backscatter communication protocols, and design fully-functional battery-free sensors. The platform runs a 16-bit MSP430 microcontroller and receives all power from a 915 MHz CW source. It has a measured sensitivity of −6dBm where digital communication is possible and sufficient voltage (1.8 V) is harvested to operate an MSP430 microcontroller. The reader for this system is a custom design that transmits a CW signal and allows output data to be easily seen with an oscilloscope. To showcase the effectiveness of the system, a battery-free sensor designed by a group of undergraduate students with no prior RFID experience is presented. The exemplary sensor is capable of wirelessly telemetering luminance.