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]

Blog Entry

	Another update... posted by Kevin Nickels on 2nd August 2008 KMN Note - I just moved the images to my webspace, the work is all Charles'. "CJarvis" said: This will probably be my last update to this project. The summer program at Trinity has ended, and as I have graduated, I've found a job in Houston and start later in the fall. So for this blog, I'll give an overview of what we've accomplished this summer in the lab at Trinity. The robot arm controller is in a stable, finished-for-now state. It can control 5 motor independently, all 5 at once or one at a time. Shown above is the block diagram in Quartus that runs the motors. It's main components are an address decoder/memory controller, a PWM generator, a logic module, and an 8-bit register for memory. If you want to read the manual/report on the arm controller, it can be found here. Above is the interface board hooked up to the arm and the DE2-70. We used wire wrapping for prototyping, so that it would be easier to rearrange things if necessary (and it was). One thing we didn't get finished however, was a P controller of position for the arm. We have the sensors (one of them is shown below), but we weren't able to get around to mounting them, so we couldn't test the code we developed for the P controller. However, later in the fall/spring, Dr. Nickels will probably be hiring a current student to do some more work on the project(s). The other project that was (mostly) finished this summer was the update of our Instron 4201 machine, which has been mentioned in earlier posts. The operating manual for the Instron and its VI can be found here. However, we did not get to where we wanted to on this project due to never being able to obtain the Efika/QNX/LabView machine from National Instruments. You may have also noticed that there hasn't been much in this blog actually dealing with the Efika. That's because my strong point was working with digital logic, and not the Linux/hardware side of things. We are also bringing in someone during the fall to help us with finishing up the labs as well as help us get the interface between the Efika and the CPLD/FPGA PCI cards working.