Efika 5200B Project Embedded Systems Portability in category Embedded proposed by Charles Jarvis on 1st March 2008 (accepted on 1st May 2008) Developers: Charles Jarvis, Kevin Nickels, Matt Sealey [View Full Project]

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	Progress on 'The EFIKA Lab' posted by Kevin Nickels on 4th June 2008 One way to summarize the project would be to say that we're bulding an EFIKA lab at Trinity. If you read the description, you'll see that we're actually making a half-dozen demos of "different ways to control things". So we've got say a toy model engine - how to control the speed? You could have an op-amp circuit with a cap and resistor (PI control). But setting the setpoint or change gains is fairly manual. You could have a microcontroller (e.g. OOPIC) with an H-bridge, now changing the control scheme or setpoints is software. But that's about all this controller can handle - think about moving to a 6-axis robot arm. Now it's not enough (not 6 timer/counters to handle encoders, motor synchronization, etc...) With some analog/digital electronics interfacing, we could design a circuit to do this, inside an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). Same problem as op-amp WRT control, though. Now, what if we could, using a computer, do things like change the control gains or setpoint? With a PCI-enabled FPGA and an EFIKA, we think that we can do this. Better yet, we're also going to do it with a lower-power computer and a lighter-weight FPGA/CPLD. Stay tuned.