PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The need of Control units in today's industry has increased exponentially. With people wanting compact appliances and products, one single board performing multiple tasks is considered to be a perfect solution. This Custom Control Unit is designed keeping the same requirement in mind. The Control unit eliminates the usage of multiple nodes for tasks and performs various tasks simultaneously.

The Control unit has two processors, a primary processor and a secondary processor which increases the number of I/O pins available. The main task of the primary processor is data acquisition and signal conditioning whereas the secondary processor is used for Telemetry.

CIRCUIT DESIGN

The ATmega328P acts as the main processing unit whereas ESP8266MOD (ESP-12F) acts as the secondary processing unit. These two are connected via the hardware serial pins i.e. UART pins (TX and RX). The circuit also consists of a voltage regulator, an FTDI module and other necessary components like resistors, capacitors, fuses and pushbuttons (as a RST button). The circuit has an oscillator of 16MHz.

WORKING AND APPLICATIONS

The board runs on a power supply of 5V. It can be coded using Arduino itself. The ATmega328P can be connected to various sensors to get data which will then be sent to ESP8266 using UART communication protocol. ESSP8266 then sends the data over cloud to store the data on any cloud based database platform which can then be visualised. The ATmega338P can also send commands in the form of signals to various nodes via SPI,I2C, CAN protocols thus having control over them.

Thus, data acquisition, control and telemetry all are being performed on a single compact board.

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