Remote experimentation and control have led researchers to develop new technologies as well as implement existing techniques. The multidisciplinary nature of research in electromechanical systems has led to the synergy of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science. This work describes the design of a model of a Gantry Mechanism, which maneuvers a web-cam. The user controls virtually the position of end-effecter of the Gantry Mechanism using a Graphical User Interface. The GUI is accessed over the Internet. In order to reduce the unbalanced vibrations of the Gantry Mechanism, we investigate the development of an algorithm of input shaping. A model of the Gantry Mechanism is built, and it is controlled over the Internet to view experimentation of the SCARA Robot. The system performance is studied by comparing the inputs such as distances and angles with outputs, and methods to improve the performance are suggested.

In this study, an ignition unit was designed and constructed for a new design engine with eight cylinders and sixteen pistons. The ignition coils with two high voltage outputs were used to ignite sixteen spark plugs on the system. They were driven by PIC16F628A based igniter circuits triggered with digital signals. The igniter circuits receive ignition signals in a square wave form from a main control circuit / they open or close primary voltage of the induction coils to ignite spark plugs. This main control circuit is based on PIC16F877A / and there are two of them. The duty of main control circuit is to determine ignition advance according to engine speed and cooling water temperature, and send proper ignition signals to the igniter circuits. This main control circuit receives engine speed from the other main circuit (secondary control circuit) with serial communication and reads cooling water temperature and then it reads advance value from external eeprom memory according to engine speed and temperature. The main control circuit receives cylinder position signals from the secondary control circuit and adds advance value on them to form ignition timing signals which triggers igniter circuits. The secondary control circuit reads engine speed and determines cylinder positions with two magnetic pick-ups and LM2907 circuits on a gear wheel. This gear wheel was used to simulate disks on the crank shaft of the cars, and driven with an electric motor. The ignition unit was tested for different engine speeds, and its proper working was proved.

This thesis aims to develop a control system for measuring electromagnetic compability (EMC). This has meant that a controller designed around an ATmega8 microcontroller has been manufactured and programmed. It has also meant the development of a comprehensive control software in the program MATLAB. The control system has been tested with satisfactory results and can now, monitor and control measurements of the EMC-type. / Detta examensarbete syftar till att utveckla ett styrsystem för mätning av elektromagnetisk kompabilitet (EMC). Detta har inneburit att ett styrkort uppbyggt kring en ATmega8 mikrokontroller har tillverkats och programmerats. Det har även inneburet utveckling av en övergripande kontrollmjukvara i programmet MATLAB. Styrsystemet har testats med tillfredsställande resultat och kan nu, övervaka och kontrollera mätningar av EMC-typ.

A Laser Music System has been created, that combines a laser and light sensor system with an infrared distance sensing system that detects the position of a user’s hand when it intersects one or more of the individual laser beam. The laser beams, which are made visible by a small amount of smoke in a dark room, provide visual guidance to the user to reduce the difficulty of using a non-contact instrument as well as enhancing an appealing optical effect for the user. The system uses a number of Sharp distance sensors to map the position of the user’s hand to a variable like pitch. The user should move their hand to different heights to achieve a desired pitch. The laser beam should be broken to trigger the desired note.

The use of microcontrollers and FPGAs is getting more and more wide spread in electronic designs. A recent developmenthas been to implement microcontrollers onboard the FPGA, there are a lot of benefits but also disadvantages with this. Often the microcontroler requires a lot of resources in the expensive FPGA. This is where PicoBlaze, a microcontroller provided by Xilinx, fits in. It is designed with one main object, keep it as small and powerful as possible. In this report PicoBlaze is evaluated and documented. Two implementations have been done. One smaller to show how to use PicoBlaze and one larger implementation of an Ethernet network interface. The function of the implementations have been verified on a experiment board utilizing a Virtex-II FPGA. The conclusion is that PicoBlaze is a very powerful microcontroller in comparison to the resources it uses on the FPGA. It uses only a little more than 80 slices on a Virtex II FPGA. This is its main advantage, the disadvantages of PicoBlaze is its limited program memory and the limited address space.

This thesis project was carried out at Volvo Car Corporation. It is based on an EU project called Locust in which a bio-inspired visual sensor system (the Locust sensor system) for automotive collision avoidance was developed. The Locust sensor system is designed to emulate the collision avoidance functionality of the Locust grasshopper, which is well-known for its extraordinary vision based collision avoidance ability, in particular with regard to its fast reaction times to perceived threats. Volvo Car Corporation is interested in the possibility of using the bio-inspired technology developed in the Locust project to improve its already existing collision avoidance systems. Pedestrian collision avoidance is of high interest, for which the properties of the Locust grasshopper are desirable. The purpose of this thesis project is to develop two demonstrator vehicles to test the performance of the Locust sensor system, carry out the testing, and evaluate its usability for Volvo Car Corporation. The first vehicle is a scale 1:5 model car that was originally developed in a thesis project at KTH, and the second a full scale Volvo XC90. It was found in the testing that the Locust sensor system is promising for pedestrian collision avoidance applications. The results for detecting other vehicles were also acceptable, but Volvo Car Corporation already has other collision avoidance systems with better performance in this regard. In general the test results were very good for speeds up to about 40 km/h. This indicates that the Locust sensor system would be most usable in a city driving environment, parking lot situations, and for driving in residential areas.

Remote experimentation and control have led researchers to develop new technologies as well as implement existing techniques. The multidisciplinary nature of research in electromechanical systems has led to the synergy of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science. This work describes the design of a model of a Gantry Mechanism, which maneuvers a web-cam. The user controls virtually the position of end-effecter of the Gantry Mechanism using a Graphical User Interface. The GUI is accessed over the Internet. In order to reduce the unbalanced vibrations of the Gantry Mechanism, we investigate the development of an algorithm of input shaping. A model of the Gantry Mechanism is built, and it is controlled over the Internet to view experimentation of the SCARA Robot. The system performance is studied by comparing the inputs such as distances and angles with outputs, and methods to improve the performance are suggested.

For the on-chip bus, flexibility is the key to reuse by enabling developers to select the optimal architecture to efficiently meet the performance requirements of a wide variety of systems. AMBA is an open standard, on-chip bus specification that details a strategy for the interconnection and management of functional blocks that makes up a System-on-Chip (SoC). AMBA will let designers multiply the total bandwidth available in a system without changing the bus interface on existing intellectual property (IP) cores. Sometimes, the SoC designer to select the optimal combination of bus frequency (to match the peripherals) and number of channels (to achieve the bandwidth), using the AMBA Multi-layer architecture. The AHB of the AMBA System Bus connects embedded processors such as an ARM core to high-performance peripherals, DMA controllers, on-chip memory and interfaces. It is a high-speed, high-bandwidth bus that supports multi-master bus management to maximize system performance. In this thesis, we implement an software, Automatic Generation of On-Chip Bus Infrastructure for SoC, and it supports the AMBA AHB, Multi-layer AHB architecture to optimize system bandwidth, or AHB-Lite to streamline single master layers. By user set up, it can generate the relative on-chip bus infrastructure. We use each AHB Monitor of SDV and Synposys to validate the protocol of infrastructure respectively. In Test Patterns, we use Bus Functional Model to verify all type transfers of bus. In hardware implement, we use SYS32TM, SYS32TME, SYS16TM, and MEMCU to integrate three type AHBs. Every example, we also build FPGA prototyping and chip layout. We do this to validate our on-chip bus infrastructure.

In this thesis, an 8-bit microcontroller, PIC 16F871, has been implemented using SystemC with classical hardware design methods. Analog modules of the microcontroller have been modeled behaviorally with SystemC-AMS which is the analog and mixed signal extensions for the SystemC. SystemC-AMS provides the capability to model non-digital modules and synchronization with the SystemC kernel. In this manner, electronic systems that have both digital and analog components can be described and simulated very effectively. The PIC 16F871 is a well known and very common microcontroller. Its architecture, peripheral modules and analog components makes this microcontroller pretty good model for a System on Chip (SoC) concept. Designed microcontroller&rsquo / s peripheral modules, instruction set and addressing modes have been verified utilizing the test codes. Besides, designed microcontroller has been tested with 16-bit CRC code. Moreover, a synchronous demodulator system that involves designed microcontroller and additional analog units has been constructed and simulated. Finally, SystemC to hardware flow has been demonstrated with implementation of arithmetic logic unit of the 16F871 into FPGA based hardware.

In this thesis, co-design and co-verification of a microcontroller hardware and software using SystemC is studied. For this purpose, an MC68HC11 microcontroller unit, a test bench that contains input and output modules for the verification of microcontroller unit are implemented using SystemC programming language and a visual simulation program is developed using C# programming language in Microsoft .NET platform. SystemC is a C++ class library that is used for co-designing hardware and software of a system. One of the advantages of using SystemC in system design is the ability to design each module of the system in different abstraction levels. In this thesis, test bench modules are designed in a high abstraction level and microcontroller hardware modules are designed in a lower abstraction level. At the end, a simulation platform that is used for co-simulation and co-verification of hardware and software modules of overall system is developed by combining microcontroller implementation, test bench modules, test software and visual simulation program. Simulations at different levels are performed on the system in the developed simulation platform. Simulation results helped observing errors in designed modules easily and making corrections until all results verified designed hardware modules. This stuation showed that co-designing and co-verifying hardware and software of a system helps finding errors and making corrections in early stages of system design cycle and so reducing design time of the system.