ECE 4760: Laboratory 4

Tachometer and motor controller

Introduction.

You will build a digital tachometer which displays motor speed on a LCD display and controls the motor with user-selectable parameters to maintain constant speed. You will use ProtoThreads and write your program as tasks.


Procedures.

Serial Connection:
There will be a USB connection for serial communication between the running program and the PC, which will be running PuTTY. Set up PuTTY for 9600 baud, no parity, 1 stop-bit, no flow-control. In the PuTTY config window, choose serial connection, then click serial in the left hand panel and set the parameters. Connect PuTTY to whatever serial port the USB connection configures. Use Control Panel...System...Hardware Tab...Device Manager Button...+Ports to find out which serial port is connected to the USB connection. NOTE that the default connection for U2RX (uart 2 receive) in Protothreads, and SDO1 (spi channnel 1 data) in the TFT library are BOTH mapped to the same pin, RB11, pin 22. You will need to remap one of the connections, perhaps map SDO1 to RA1!
In tft_master.c You will need to change RPB11R = 3; to RPA1R = 3;
Or equivalently PPSOutput(2, RPA1, SDO1);

Use pins:

There are two styles of cable.
Use either one of:

  1. The black serial-USB connection is a USB cable with embedded ft232rq USB/serial bridge chip running at 5 volt logic levels
    -- Use wires to connect the the three signals shown.
    -- Do NOT connect USB Vcc to anything
    , unless you need 5 volt power for a circuit not associated with the MCU.
    -- Connect UART receive only to the 5-volt tolerant pin pin 22, (Diagram : 5 volt tolerant pins in gray)
    -- IF you include a 660 ohm resistor from the MCU receive pin to ground (as shown), then you can use 3.3 volt pins.

    usb cable detail
    USB connection \
  2. The blue serial-USB connection is a USB cable with embedded USB/serial bridge chip with 3.3 volt logic levels.
    -- Use wires to connect the the three signals below.
    -- Do NOT connect USB Vcc (red wire) to anything
    , unless you need 5 volt power for a circuit not associated with the MCU.
    -- Connect UART receive pin 22 to the green wire
    -- Connect UART transmit pin 21 to white wire
    -- Connect MCU ground to black wire
    blue cable


Concurrency
:
For this assignment you must write your code using ProtoThreads 1_2_1.
You will need to set the #define use_uart_serial option in config.h on the ProtoThreads page.
I suggest the following thread layout, but you can use anything that works for you:

IR sensor:
We will be bouncing infrared light off the fan blades and detecting intensity variations in the reflected light to determine the speed. The circuit below uses a infrared emitter to shine light onto a surface. The relected or transmitted light is detected by a phototransistor. You will want to run the phototransistor output through an opamp comparator to produce fast, logic-level output swings. Even if the levels at the output of the phototransistor are compatable with CMOS logic, the rise time of the light will be too slow for accuracy. The 10K potentiometer sets the MCP6242 comparator threshold, the 1M resistor sets the hysteresis and may need to be adjusted. Hysteresis makes the rising/falling edges of the waveform less sensitive to noise.

Note the * in the following schematic indicating the long component lead!

The left image below shows a fan with a dab of white paint on the hub. The clear IR emitter is pointed at the hub. The dark phototransistor is also pointed at the hub. The top trace on the right shows the output from the phototransistor. As the white paint rotates in front of the sensor, the transistor turns on and the voltage drops. The bottom trace shows the output of the opamp. The threshold should be adjusted so that the opamp switches at a voltage where abs(dv/dt) is high. The output of the opamp could be fed directly into the capture input, as long as the opamp power rails are Vdd and ground. Keep the opamp output away from the PWM lead coming from the MCU. Capacitative coupling can corrupt the output of the opamp!

For debugging, you can see a slight glow in the IR emitter using your cell phone camera because a solid state camera is sensitive to infrared light. You may need to shield the phototransistor from the LED by slipping a small piece of black paper between them so that the transistor sees the white paint, but not the LED. The symptom will be that the transistor output is always low.

fan + sensors scope image pulse train

Motor Control:
You will need to drive a fan from the mcu. Fans have motors which can cause nasty inductive spikes to wipe out the transistors in the mcu port. The circuit shown below is fairly safe. An optoisolator completely isolates the MCU from the motor. The diode placed across the motor shorts out spikes when the motor is turned off. The resistor grounding the base of the phototransistor should be set for best falltime, probably around 1Mohm. The motor capacitor should start around 0.1uf. Increase it if there is too much spike noise on the analog input, but be sure to use ceramic capacitors, not electrolytic. Electrolytic capacitors are too slow. The pinout of the 4N35 optoisolator and 2SK4017 are also shown. Note that the bandwidth of the 4N35 is very small, so use a low PWM frequency, perhaps about 1000 Hz.

A matlab program demonstrating the PID control algorithm includes the following nonlinear effects: The sensor is modeled as producing a new value once/revolution. The effect is to make a feedback which is dependent on the speed of the motor, with the motor becoming more stable at higher speed. The motor is modeled as a second-order system when it is powered, and a first-order system when it is coasting. The controller has saturation (maximum voltage) and rectification (no negative output). You might also look at PID Tuning and Ziegler–Nichols method. (original paper . "Optimum settings for automatic controllers") and a critique.


Assignment

Write two to four tasks using ProtoThreads and construct a circuit which will:

You will demo all the features above to your TA.
Your program should not need to be reset during the demo.

Your written lab report should include the sections mentioned in the policy page, and :


Copyright Cornell University October 28, 2016