Design of an Industrial Automated System which Measures Parameters in a Real Time Environment
[1]
Omolola A. Ogbolumani, Department of Computer Engineering, Yaba College of Technology, Yaba, Lagos, Nigeria.
[2]
David O. Odedele, Department of Electrical/Electronic Engineering, University of Lagos, Akoka, Lagos, Nigeria.
Industrial Workers are often prone to accidents in the course of the discharge of their duties especially in high temperature or high frequency areas; hence the need to minimize the rate of exposure of these workers to these precarious environments. This paper discusses a way out of these avoidable scenarios through the design of an automated system, which is capable of measuring parameters such as voltage and temperature in an industrial environment. Two Universal Serial Bus (USB) PIC Microcontrollers were used; one functioned as the Master Controller attached to the Microcomputer and the other as a slave, driven by the Master Controller. The USB PIC Microcontroller was connected by only three wires to the Microcomputer where the I/O pins could be read or set using a simple ASCII protocol sent from a Microcomputer USB port. The communication between the PC and the system was very fast due to the use of a high speed USB V2.0 as the interface having a data transfer rate of 480MBits/s. The use of high-performance Microcontrollers with programmable I/O lines and powerful integrated peripherals reduced the number of electronic components and in turn simplified the entire system. The use of the PIC18F4550 Microcontroller especially improved the acquisition rate performance. It is therefore recommended that a Digital Signal PIC Microcontroller (DSPIC) be used in place of the regular PIC18F4550 Microcontroller for improved processing techniques and so on.
Automated, System, Measures, Parameters, Environment
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