PneumaticLevitator

This is a project for the Instituto Tecnológico de Morelia University for the Control lecture that helps the students to learn more about the digital PID control, and gives the oportunity to explore another new control laws since the project allows the communication via USB with Matlab, Python, Arduino Monitor, etc.

This project can be seen as a control plant, were the main objective is to control the vertical position of the unicel ball with the pneumatic force efectuaded by the CPU FAN

Features

• Internal PID for the control of the ball
• External communication with USB (USB C Port), allowing the user implement another control law with Python or Matlab
• Manual control with the encoder on the top of the project

Hardware

This project has two main electronic boards each with it's own STM32F411CEU6, the main board is called Motherboard, and the slave board it's called Daughterboard

Motherboard

• Control the communication with the USB device
• Handler of the internal PID
• Controls the FAN
• Receives the power and redistributes to the system
• Has an EEPROM memory for the non-volatile data
• Communication with Daughterboard via UART @ 921600 B/s
• Communicates and processes the distance sensor (VL53L0X)
• Reports the errors with a led system

Motherboard Schematic

Motherboard Layout

Motherboard 3D Model

Motherboard STM32 Pinout

Daughterboard

• Interface and debounce the user buttons
• Interface and incremental encoder that is used as a user interface
• Communication with Daughterboard via UART @ 921600 B/s
• Indicates the with leds the control modes
• Works as a GPU with the LCD TFT Display via SPI @ 4MHz
• Displays all the content of the GUI with a library called μGUI and this fork for the LCD Adaption on STM32

Daughterboard Schematic

Daughterboard Layout

Daughterboard 3D Model Front

Daughterboard 3D Model Back

Daughterboard STM32 Pinout

Memory consumption

Memory Consumption @ Release v0.1.0 Not dynamic memory allocation used at the moment (excluding the heap)

Motherboard

• RAM -> 40.94%
• FLASH -> 27.32%

Daughterboard

• RAM -> 60.71%
• FLASH -> 85.82%

OS Details

All the threads are allocated statically

Motherboard

• Heap Size: 20KB
• Heap Usage: 24B (Memory pools not implemented yet)

  OS Threads

  Task	Stack	Priority	Status
  TaskWdgM	1KB	Realtime	Enabled
  TaskModeManager	512B	AboveNormal	Disabled
  TaskPID	1KB	AboveNormal	Enabled
  TaskCOM	2KB	High	Enabled
  SubTaskUSB	4KB	Normal	Enabled
  SubTaskUART	1KB	Normal	Enabled
  TaskDiagAppl	512B	Normal	Disabled
  TaskLeds	256B	AboveNormal	Enabled
  TaskSensor	1KB	AboveNormal	Enabled
  TaskFAN	512B	AboveNormal	Enabled

Daughterboard

• Heap Size: 15KB
• Heap Usage: 2.3KB

  OS Threads

  Task	Stack	Priority	Status
  TaskIdle (Will be removed soon)	256B	Low	Enabled
  TaskUI	40KB(This can be reduced)	Normal	Enabled
  TaskLeds	256B	BelowNormal	Disabled
  TaskWdgM	512B	Realtime	Enabled
  TaskCOM	4KB	AboveNormal	Enabled
  TaskDiagAppl	512B	Normal	Enabled
  TaskGPUResMan	1KB	AboveNormal	Enabled
  TaskHMI	1KB	High	Enabled

Requirements

• Hardware mentioned above
• STM32F411CEU6
• STLink Programmer
• STM32CubeIDE

Topics used during the development

Software Engineering

• Software Architecture
• Software Components
• Version Control

Operative Systems

• Tasks
• Preemptive algorithm
• Round Robin algorithm
• Data structures
• Stack overflow
• Heap
• Heap algorithms
• Concurrency
• Binary semaphore
• Queues
• Mutex
• Event Flags
• CMSIS_V2 RTOS
• Dynamic Memory allocation

C Programming language concepts

• Unions
• Structures
• _Generic Macro
• Variadic function like macros
• Function like macro
• Object like macro
• Variadic functions
• Switch compilers