Small low-cost embedded board for a model airplane

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Albert Goodwill 19 years ago

Hello Electronics Experts,

For a real-time signal monitoring and logging application, I am loking a small, low power and light weight microcontroller board. This board will be carried on a remotely piloted model airplane. As the airplane flies it will collect data from various sensors and save them to a SD memory card as well as it will send selected data to the ground for data logging and monitoring.

Can you recommend any embedded board which can satisfy the following requirements?

THX,

Albert Goodwill AlbertGoodwill @ yahoo . com

Requirements ============

ADC (Analog to Digital Converter) 13 channel (simultaneous sample hold is desirable) 16 bits resolution it will be used to capture 1000 samples/ second

I2C interface
SPI interface
4 X UART
Free (or low-cost) C compiler and SW development environment

Following are the sensors to be connected to the embedded board Sensors with analog outputs * 3 axis accelerometers (0-5v or 0-3.3v analog outputs) * 3 axis gyros (0-5v or 0-3.3v analog outputs) * 3 axis magnetosensors (0-5v or 0-3.3v analog outputs) * 2 pressure sensors (0-5v or 0-3.3v analog outputs) * 2 current sensor (0-500mv outputs)

RMP Sensor * 0-10000 RMP sensor with 1 logic pulse per rotation

Fuel Consumption sensor * 1 logic pulse per xx milliliter fuel flow

Sensors with I2C iterface * 10 temperature sensors with I2C

Other Sensors * GPS receiver (accepting DGPS correction) with RS232 interface

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Al 19 years ago

Check out this web site for suggestions:

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The magazine has great articals on what you have described. You really are looking for something that is quite high powered and will require a really powerful model plane.

Al

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AntiSPAM_embeddedhw 19 years ago

Albert,

Why do you need 10 temperatures sensors, search for thermals? You'll have to provide more information about the sensor interfaces, but this is a lot of functionality for a single micro. You might want to use multiple microcontroller and that may come in useful if application is physically separate (left/right wings, forward, aft), or data separate (temperature and pressure).

There are any number of micros that could be used for this application, with various trade-offs. If you go with AVR, your software tools cost will be low using GNU C tools. From your previous newsgroup posts you appear to have experience with AVR and PIC, so either of those should be an easy routes to take.

You'll not likely find a micro with 13 channels of simultaneous hold.

13 analog channels is a lot for a micro.and simultaneous hold is atypical when using a MUX Silicon Labs has a nice 8051 board with both 16bit and 24bit mux'ed ADC, but only 8 channels. I recently used the Silabs F350 with 8 24-bit ADC channels to sample a Honeywell 3 axis magnetic sensor at 1kHz. Works well.

I'd split the functions into at least TWO, possibly Three micros. Use Two micros with 8channels of ADC, and use the third for RF transmission and data storage. You can communicate between these serially. This will also make it easier to get 4 serial ports, as you typical get 2 UART channels per micro. 4 UART channels is unusual and with the functionality you need, you don't want to be bit banging the serial ports.

The RF transmission will probably dominate your power requirements, so I wouldn't worry about finding the lowest power micro, unless you do away with RF transmssion. With continuous 1000 samples per second, your sleep opportunites will be limited.

snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com Indianapolis, IN USA

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Si Ballenger 19 years ago

Review the below projects might have similr topics.

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Small low-cost embedded board for a model airplane

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