scholarly journals A smart home embedded computer system on programmable chips

Author(s):  
Jonathan B. Chan

System on Programmable Chip (SoPC) based embedded system development has been increasing, aiming for improved system design, testing, and cost savings in the workflow for Application Specific ICs (ASIC). We examine the development of Smart Home embedded systems, which have been traditionally based on a fixed processor and memory, with inflexible configuration. We investigate how more ability can be added by updating firmware without the burden of updating hardware, or using a full (but dedicated) general purpose computer system. Our development and implementation of the smart home controller is based on the SoPC development environment from Altera. The development board includes all the necessary parts such as processor, memory, and various communication interfaces. The initial implementation includes a simple protocol for communication between home appliances or devices and controller. This protocol allows data transfer between home appliances or devices and the controller, in turn allowing both to support more features. We have investigated and developed a home resource management application. The main resources being managed in this project are hot and cold water, electricity, and gas. We have introduced a number of expert rules to manage these resources. Additionally, we have developed a home simulator, with virtual appliances and devices, that communicates with the home controller. The simulator interacts with the SoPC based smart home embedded system developed in this project by generating messages representing a number of smart appliances in the home. It provides a useful testing environment for the smart home embedded system to verify its design goals.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan B. Chan

System on Programmable Chip (SoPC) based embedded system development has been increasing, aiming for improved system design, testing, and cost savings in the workflow for Application Specific ICs (ASIC). We examine the development of Smart Home embedded systems, which have been traditionally based on a fixed processor and memory, with inflexible configuration. We investigate how more ability can be added by updating firmware without the burden of updating hardware, or using a full (but dedicated) general purpose computer system. Our development and implementation of the smart home controller is based on the SoPC development environment from Altera. The development board includes all the necessary parts such as processor, memory, and various communication interfaces. The initial implementation includes a simple protocol for communication between home appliances or devices and controller. This protocol allows data transfer between home appliances or devices and the controller, in turn allowing both to support more features. We have investigated and developed a home resource management application. The main resources being managed in this project are hot and cold water, electricity, and gas. We have introduced a number of expert rules to manage these resources. Additionally, we have developed a home simulator, with virtual appliances and devices, that communicates with the home controller. The simulator interacts with the SoPC based smart home embedded system developed in this project by generating messages representing a number of smart appliances in the home. It provides a useful testing environment for the smart home embedded system to verify its design goals.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anwar Haq

As home becomes more technologically advanced nowadays people not only need to protect their homes and families from theft or fire, but from carbon monoxide, excessive heat or low temperatures, flooding as well as monitoring their loved ones while they are away. In this research Project, we present the design case for an intelligent embedded system (Hardware and Software) called "SmartLife". We build a working prototype for SmartLife which is made up of tiny sensors, mobile devices, appliances and personal computers from diverse sources. Considering diversity in smart home environment the architecture must be open and flexible to embrace a variety of entities without any special favor towards particular participants or target domains. SmartLife will be the point of intelligence in the smart home environment (complete pervasive environment) which not only communicates with wireless sensors network (monitor & control) but also provides a secure state of mind to elderly homeowners. The work introduces the basics of uClinux kernel as well as the differences between uClinux and the general purpose operating system Linux. It also introduces FPGA based softcore CPU NIOS-II as an embedded platform for our research project. Our uClinux based architecture provides an integrated and comprehensive framework for building pervasive applications. We describe the design and implementation of our architecture as well as building SmartLife application within it.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anwar Haq

As home becomes more technologically advanced nowadays people not only need to protect their homes and families from theft or fire, but from carbon monoxide, excessive heat or low temperatures, flooding as well as monitoring their loved ones while they are away. In this research Project, we present the design case for an intelligent embedded system (Hardware and Software) called "SmartLife". We build a working prototype for SmartLife which is made up of tiny sensors, mobile devices, appliances and personal computers from diverse sources. Considering diversity in smart home environment the architecture must be open and flexible to embrace a variety of entities without any special favor towards particular participants or target domains. SmartLife will be the point of intelligence in the smart home environment (complete pervasive environment) which not only communicates with wireless sensors network (monitor & control) but also provides a secure state of mind to elderly homeowners. The work introduces the basics of uClinux kernel as well as the differences between uClinux and the general purpose operating system Linux. It also introduces FPGA based softcore CPU NIOS-II as an embedded platform for our research project. Our uClinux based architecture provides an integrated and comprehensive framework for building pervasive applications. We describe the design and implementation of our architecture as well as building SmartLife application within it.


10.28945/3391 ◽  
2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moshe Pelleh

In our world, where most systems become embedded systems, the approach of designing embedded systems is still frequently similar to the approach of designing organic systems (or not embedded systems). An organic system, like a personal computer or a work station, must be able to run any task submitted to it at any time (with certain constrains depending on the machine). Consequently, it must have a sophisticated general purpose Operating System (OS) to schedule, dispatch, maintain and monitor the tasks and assist them in special cases (particularly communication and synchronization between them and with external devices). These OSs require an overhead on the memory, on the cache and on the run time. Moreover, generally they are task oriented rather than machine oriented; therefore the processor's throughput is penalized. On the other hand, an embedded system, like an Anti-lock Braking System (ABS), executes always the same software application. Frequently it is a small or medium size system, or made up of several such systems. Many small or medium size embedded systems, with limited number of tasks, can be scheduled by our proposed hardware architecture, based on the Motorola 500MHz MPC7410 processor, enhancing its throughput and avoiding the software OS overhead, complexity, maintenance and price. Encouraged by our experimental results, we shall develop a compiler to assist our method. In the meantime we will present here our proposal and the experimental results.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 1031
Author(s):  
Joseba Gorospe ◽  
Rubén Mulero ◽  
Olatz Arbelaitz ◽  
Javier Muguerza ◽  
Miguel Ángel Antón

Deep learning techniques are being increasingly used in the scientific community as a consequence of the high computational capacity of current systems and the increase in the amount of data available as a result of the digitalisation of society in general and the industrial world in particular. In addition, the immersion of the field of edge computing, which focuses on integrating artificial intelligence as close as possible to the client, makes it possible to implement systems that act in real time without the need to transfer all of the data to centralised servers. The combination of these two concepts can lead to systems with the capacity to make correct decisions and act based on them immediately and in situ. Despite this, the low capacity of embedded systems greatly hinders this integration, so the possibility of being able to integrate them into a wide range of micro-controllers can be a great advantage. This paper contributes with the generation of an environment based on Mbed OS and TensorFlow Lite to be embedded in any general purpose embedded system, allowing the introduction of deep learning architectures. The experiments herein prove that the proposed system is competitive if compared to other commercial systems.


SIMULATION ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003754972199601
Author(s):  
Jinchao Chen ◽  
Keke Chen ◽  
Chenglie Du ◽  
Yifan Liu

The ARINC 653 operation system is currently widely adopted in the avionics industry, and has become the mainstream architecture in avionics applications because of its strong agility and reliability. Although ARINC 653 can efficiently reduce the weight and energy consumption, it results in a serious development and verification problem for avionics systems. As ARINC 653 is non-open source software and lacks effective support for software testing and debugging, it is of great significance to build a real-time simulation platform for ARINC 653 on general-purpose operating systems, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of system development and implementation. In this paper, a virtual ARINC 653 platform is designed and realized by using real-time simulation technology. The proposed platform is composed of partition management, communication management, and health monitoring management, provides the same operation interfaces as the ARINC 653 system, and allows dynamic debugging of avionics applications without requiring the actual presence of real devices. Experimental results show that the platform not only simulates the functionalities of ARINC 653, but also meets the real-time requirements of avionics applications.


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