An Integrated Control and Data Acquisition System for Pharmaceutical Capsule Inspection

Pharmaphil Inc. manufactures two-part gelatin capsules for the pharmaceutical industry. Their current methods of quality control of their product is by performing manual inspection of every carton of capsules prior to shipment. In today\u27s modern manufacturing world, more efficient and cost-effective means of quality control exist. It is Pharmaphil\u27s desire to develop a custom machine vision system to replace manual inspection with a potential opportunity in the capsule manufacturing quality control market. In collaboration with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Windsor, a novel system was developed to achieve this goal. The objective was to develop a system capable of inspecting 1000 capsules per minute with the ability to detect holes, cracks, dents, bubble, double caps and incorrect colour or size. Using an antiquated machine vision system for capsule inspection from the mid-nineties as a base, a modern inspection system was developed that performed faster and more thorough inspections. As a measure to minimize the overall system cost as well as to increase flexibility, a full custom design was undertaken. The resulting system follows a traditional machine vision system whereby the main components include an image acquisition component, a processing unit and machine control. The designed system uses custom USB2.0 cameras to acquire images, a standard desktop PC to process image data and a custom machine control board to perform machine control and timing. The system operates with four identical quadrants operating in parallel to increase throughput. The final system developed provided a proof-of-concept for the approach taken. The machine control and image acquisition component of the system yielded a maximum throughput of 1200 capsules per minute. After incorporating image inspection, the final result was a system that was capable of inspecting capsules at a rate of about 800 capsules per minute with high accuracy. With optimizations, the system throughput can be further improved. The findings throughout the development of the prototype system provide an excellent basis from which the first generation commercial unit can be designed

Modular Verification of Interrupt-Driven Software

Interrupts have been widely used in safety-critical computer systems to handle outside stimuli and interact with the hardware, but reasoning about interrupt-driven software remains a difficult task. Although a number of static verification techniques have been proposed for interrupt-driven software, they often rely on constructing a monolithic verification model. Furthermore, they do not precisely capture the complete execution semantics of interrupts such as nested invocations of interrupt handlers. To overcome these limitations, we propose an abstract interpretation framework for static verification of interrupt-driven software that first analyzes each interrupt handler in isolation as if it were a sequential program, and then propagates the result to other interrupt handlers. This iterative process continues until results from all interrupt handlers reach a fixed point. Since our method never constructs the global model, it avoids the up-front blowup in model construction that hampers existing, non-modular, verification techniques. We have evaluated our method on 35 interrupt-driven applications with a total of 22,541 lines of code. Our results show the method is able to quickly and more accurately analyze the behavior of interrupts.Comment: preprint of the ASE 2017 pape

B.O.G.G.L.E.S.: Boundary Optical GeoGraphic Lidar Environment System

The purpose of this paper is to describe a pseudo X-ray vision system that pairs a Lidar scanner with a visualization device. The system as a whole is referred to as B.O.G.G.L.E.S. There are several key factors that went into the development of this system and the background information and design approach are thoroughly described. B.O.G.G.L.E.S functionality is depicted through the use of design constraints and the analysis of test results. Additionally, many possible developments for B.O.G.G.L.E.S are proposed in the paper. This indicates that there are various avenues of improvement for this project that could be implemented in the future

PROVIDING A PERSISTENT SPACE PLUG-AND-PLAY AVIONICS NETWORK ON THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION

The CubeLab is a new payload standard that greatly improves access to the International Space Station (ISS) for small, rapid turn-around microgravity experiments. CubeLabs are small (less than 16”x8”x4” and under 10kg) modular payloads that interface with the NanoRacks Platform aboard the ISS. CubeLabs receive power from the station and transfer data using the standard terrestrial plug-and-play Universal Serial Bus (USB). The Space Plug-and-play Avionics (SPA) architecture is a modular technology for spacecraft that provides an infrastructure for modular satellite components to reduce the time to orbit and development costs for satellites. This paper describes the development of a bus capable of interfacing SPA-1 payloads in the CubeLab form-factor aboard the ISS. This CubeLab also provides the “discover and join” functionality that is necessary for a SPA-1 network of devices. This will ultimately provide persistent SPA capabilities on the ISS which will allow users to send SPA-1 devices to orbit for on-the-fly installation by astronauts

Sistema de gestió domòtica per optimitzar el consum energètic d’un habitatge

Des de fa anys, la societat ha viscut diversos canvis tecnològics en àmbits com: l’electrònica, les telecomunicacions, la informàtica, l’arquitectura i l’automàtica. Aquesta evolució, ha portat com a resultat el concepte d’edifici intel·ligent. L’objectiu d’aquest projecte és dissenyar un sistema domòtic, mitjançant l’electrònica, que permeti reduir el consum energètic d’un habitatge convencional. Actualment, podem trobar diferents sistemes a l’hora de realitzar un habitatge domòtic, però tots ells estan basats en la combinació i connexió de tres elements bàsics; controladors, sensors i actuadors. Al llarg de la memòria es desenvolupa a nivell teòric: què és la domòtica i quines característiques poden tenir els diversos sistemes, també s’exposaran diversos conceptes sobre l’estalvi energètic. A continuació, es realitza el dimensionat d’un habitatge unifamiliar de 107 m2 i les seves instal·lacions. Aquest ens permet, posteriorment, comparar l’estudi energètic convencional amb el del mateix habitatge un cop implementat un sistema domòtic capaç d'actuar sobre els sistemes d'il·luminació, persianes, tendal, clima, connexió d'electrodomèstics, alarmes, reg i escenes de l'habitatge. D’aquesta manera, comprovar si hi ha un posterior estalvi en el consum. També es valoren possibles canvis pel que fa a les fonts d’energia, amb el mateix objectiu; augmentar l’eficiència energètica de l’habitatge. Finalment, es presenta un sistema domòtic que basa el seu funcionament en un microcontrolador Peripheral Interface Controller (PIC). I que es desenvolupa amb l’objectiu de poder controlar tots els sistemes que consumeixen energia de l’habitatge, gràcies als diversos sensors i actuadors. A més a més, es dissenya una petita aplicació mòbil que es connectarà via Bluetooth a la instal·lació domòtica. Això, permetrà a l'usuari actuar sobre el sistema, de la mateixa forma que es fa des de la interface física de controlador central, però d'una forma remota, intuïtiva i per tant més còmoda pel consumidor

Decoupling User Interface Design Using Libraries of Reusable Components

The integration of electronic and mechanical hardware, software and interaction design presents a challenging design space for researchers developing physical user interfaces and interactive artifacts. Currently in the academic research community, physical user interfaces and interactive artifacts are predominantly designed and prototyped either as one-off instances from the ground up, or using functionally rich hardware toolkits and prototyping systems. During this prototyping phase, undertaking an integral design of the interface or interactive artifact’s electronic hardware is frequently constraining due to the tight couplings between the different design realms and the typical need for iterations as the design matures. Several current toolkit designs have consequently embraced component-sharing and component-swapping modular designs with a view to extending flexibility and improving researcher freedom by disentangling and softening the cause-effect couplings. Encouraged by early successes of these toolkits, this research work strives to further enhance these freedoms by pursuing an alternative style and dimension of hardware modularity. Another motivation is our goal to facilitate the design and development of certain classes of interfaces and interactive artifacts for which current electronic design approaches are argued to be restrictively constraining (e.g., relating to scale and complexity). Unfortunately, this goal of a new platform architecture is met with conceptual and technical challenges on the embedded system networking front. In response, this research investigates and extends a growing field of multi-module distributed embedded systems. We identify and characterize a sub-class of these systems, calling them embedded aggregates. We then outline and develop a framework for realizing the embedded aggregate class of systems. Toward this end, this thesis examines several architectures, topologies and communication protocols, making the case for and substantial steps toward the development of a suite of networking protocols and control algorithms to support embedded aggregates. We define a set of protocols, mechanisms and communication packets that collectively form the underlying framework for the aggregates. Following the aggregates design, we develop blades and tiles to support user interface researchers

USB-C Power Adapter for DC House Project

Despite the importance of electricity and the impact it has on our daily lives, many people around the world still live without this essential utility today. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), approximately 1.1 billion people in the world did not have access to electricity in 2017. The DC House Project at Cal Poly aims to provide electricity to people living in rural areas by directly utilizing DC energy generated from renewable or human powered sources without the need for DC-AC conversions. However, one significant issue is the lack of a standardized DC wall socket. Standards for AC wall sockets exist in different countries around the world making it simple for consumers to power their appliances and electronics. No such standard currently exist for DC power delivery to consumer devices. This makes DC power within the house inconvenient for consumers as there is no single plug that all their electronic devices can share. In pursuit of the DC House Project’s overall goal, our project is to design and build a USB-C Power Adapter for the DC House Project. The power adapter will interface with the DC House’s existing 48VDC infrastructure to deliver up to 100W at 20V to various electronic loads, such as laptops. Although USBC is a new and emerging technology, it is well placed to become a standard for DC power delivery. IHS technology projects that USB-C will be utilized in nearly five billion devices by 2021. Additionally, Apple vouched for the versatility of USB-C’s power delivery capability by replacing all of the ports on their current laptops, including the charging port, with USB-C ports. Thus, this project aims to standardize the wall socket utilized within the DC House Project and potentially other DC powered homes so that DC power can be as convenient for consumers as AC power

Closed composting system controlled by PIC

This project analyses the different composting techniques existing nowadays and proposes a variant. This variant is going to be proved in a prototype. Humidity and temperature will be the sensed and controlled variables. Depending on the value of these parameters, the prototype will actuate to adjust them to the user‟s guides. This project gives a guide of the optimal temperature and humidity values of the whole process, but the prototype has been designed to permit variations of the process, so this is not only a prototype for the values gives, but a prototype for new experiments and new values First of all, the state of art and the composting process will be analyzed. Composting is a biological natural process that transforms organic waste to natural fertilizer. This process can be improved to get better material in less time. This deals us to the most important part: the control of the material to maintain it in the most proper condition. This report is divided in several parts: first of all, an introduction to the composting process and the state of art; then, the prototype will be explained; then all the hardware used for this project will be described; then there is a special mention to the PIC software and the PC software the prototype uses. At last the results of the tests performed and the conclusions and future ways of developing are shown