Design and implementation of an interrupt-driven microprocessor-based solar/electrical : irrigation system

106 p. : ill. ; 30 cmThe theory of soil, water, plants and atmosphere interaction is considered. Different methods of soil-water measurement as well as different irrigation scheduling approaches are studied. The design and implementation of a portable and autonomous interrupt-driven microprocessor- controlled irrigation system (field controller) are developed. Full circuit and program codes are implemented to verify system operation. The field controller consists of soil moisture sensors, a hardware input/ output (I/O) interface, a microprocessor as the central, player and a serial communication means with a host computer

FPGA- Based intelligent dual- axis sola tracking control system

116 p. : ill. ; 30 cmThis thesis describes the design process of an FPGA-based sensor-driven intelligent controller applied to a dual-axis sun tracking system. Fuzzy control based on fuzzy logic theory is used as a solution for the FPGA implementation of a digital controller for this industrial application. The real-time controller determines when and how much to tune the driving motors to minimize the misalignment of the solar panel surface with the sun's incident rays during the day in order to harvest maximum power from the solar panel mounted on a tracker. To achieve such a digital controller, we developed an FPGA-based heterogeneous computing platform with the capability of partitioning the overall controller between two concurrent subsystems: (1) a hardware subsystem made up of a pair of fuzzy-like PD-type controllers implemented on the programmable fabric of the FPGA using the (Very-High Speed Integrated Circuit) Hardware Description Language (VHDL), and (2) a software subsystem, a soft processor Nios® II-based supervisory control system implemented using the system-on-a-programmable (SoPC) approach. This hardware/software codesign implemented in a single chip makes the connections between the two subsystems work with low power and low latency resulting in an optimal efficiency and performance. An experimental structure is constructed in the laboratory. The controller allows this structure to perform an approximate three-dimensional hemispheroidal rotation to track the sun's movement during the day to improve the overall efficiency of the solar panel. Integrating the whole digital controller in a single chip accelerates development time while maintaining design flexibility. Moreover, it reduces the circuit board costs with a single-chip solution, and simplifies product testing Compared with traditional design approach using programmed logic (microprocessor- microcontroller- and DSP-based systems), the proposed solution uses a single low-cost FPGA device while enabling higher degrees of flexibility and concurrency. The digital controller developed with Altera Quartus II 9.1 sp2 Web Edition software development suite tools is simulated and realized on a Cyclone-II EP2C35F672C6 FPGA platform to verify its feasibility and functionalit