1. COEN 421- Embedded System and Software Design
Lab Proposal
Nov. 26, 2009
Samar Abdi
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Concordia University, Montreal

2. Experimental Setup I/O Board Soft PPC D/A A/D SRAM/Flash BRAM
sensor
I/O Board
JTAG
actuator
Xilinx Board
Development on EDK
Quanser 3-DOF
Helicopter
Soft
PPC
OPB
D/A
A/D
SRAM/Flash
FPGA
BRAM

3. Design Challenge and Learning Goals
Autopilot implementation on an embedded platform
Control application code is given
Flight path is given as a set of 3-D co-ordinates
Read position, pitch, yaw and roll from sensor
Processing to determine next pitch, yaw, and roll for desired position
Send actuation data to L/R motors
What will the students learn?
Multi-threaded programming of embedded processor using RTOS
I/O with peripherals such as buffers, A/D and D/A converters
Execution time measurement for embedded processing
Building in safety using watch-dog timers and exception handling
Fault-tolerance using redundant processors
How to design a complete real-time embedded system for a safety-critical avionic application

4. Tentative Lab Assignments
Lab 1: Multi-tasking
Create independent tasks for data processing, data display, I/O management (using files with simulated data)
Synchronization and communication between tasks using mutexes and
Lab 2: I/O design
Create high-level drivers for A/D and D/A converters
Use BRAMs as high-speed memory for buffering data
Lab 3: Real-time measurement
Execution time measurement of tasks
Response time measurement of target
Lab 4: Error detection and recovery
Creating watchdog timers
Throwing exceptions for data error or timing error and exception handling
Lab 5: Fault tolerance
Replicating system with redundant soft processor on FPGA
Measuring response to hardware faults