Projects

A Development board designed for multiple control applications, but with a primary focus in supporting the development of a Hardware In the Loop (HIL) Flight Simulator.

Based on an STM32 (ARM) Core, in a small sub-2.5" form factor.

The board supports a wide varierty of functionality (all available simultaniously)

• 4 PWM Channels
• 6+ ADC Channels (dependant on other peripheral/gpio requirements)
• 1x I2C
• 2x UARTS [with on-board USB-to-TTL on one channel for easy use]
• 1x CAN Bus with transciever on-board
• MicroSD
• Wireless Communications (1 Mile line-of-sight range)
• LCD Support capability with backlight trim
• Simple to use Boot Loader
• Reverse Polarity Protection
• 5V and 3.3V available via onboard regulators

ERIX: (Empowered. Recon. Intelligent eXperiemental) Vehicle, is a complete prototype system from the ground up - almost literally from the first wire to the last line of code the whole thing is designed to take a giant leap away from typical 'enthusiast robotics'.

Why do I say a 'Giant Leap'? - It's simple, most hobbyist robots are controlled with a PIC (typically a BASIC stamp or some other < 40 MIPS [Million Instructions Per Second] device) as their core brain. They're capable of basic sensor functionality, such as following a line, or mapping a maze - sometimes even a full room if they're really clever and have enough storage, but these are a bit rarer then maze mappers. Almost none have cameras and of those that do, even fewer do anything with the information other then relay it via some radio link.

ERIX sets out to be different, at it's heart will be a 1.5Ghz Jetway Mini-ITX with 1Gb of RAM and it will have additional processing power from a 100MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second) 32 bit DSP for all its sensory and motor controller auxiliary work. It will have a Camera and it will be doing a lot with it, image processing is at the heart of this project. More on it's capabilities later on.

Unless hardware engineers step in at a later date the whole ERIX project is to be built by a software engineer and this poses some interesting challenges all of its own. Still this might serve as a long term benefit in terms of helping others follow a similar concept for a robotic machine.

The end financial cost of the robot is loosely estimated to be around the £450-500. As you read more about what the project aims to achieve at with what systems, it is hoped you'll appreciate where this cost is and truly why ERIX will be many steps ahead of your typical enthusiast robot.

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This project is aimed at the development of a two tiered Hardware In the Loop (HIL) / Software In the Loop (SIL) Flight Control System.

This project sits above the development work on the STM32 Controller you can find on this site.  While that board was designed for use in this project, because it also lends itself to many other control applications the two are seperate entities in their own rights.

To better understand the project, lets first tackle the opening terminology:

Software In the Loop : Simulation

In this configuration the flight control system (autopilot) is being driven by software outputs, all the math occurs in another bit of software and software based inputs are returned.   As the name suggests, you're not actually testing any real hardware.

This sort of simulation work is great for getting up and running, getting control loops working, ironing out all the really silly bugs in the design etc.   However, if everything stays in software running on a top end 32/64 bit processor, what you don't get is any concept of fault tollerance - the math is always precise, latency issues are non-existant.

Hardware In the Loop : Simulation

As above except this time a number of hardware elements are in the mix with the flight simulation, so now your real flight controller platform is being passed the input data for its sensors.  It has to do the computation (typically on far lower powered processor), then it has to return appropriate outputs - all sufficiently quick enough to maintain control of the flight model.