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Torque Measurement System
The board at the right is the main board of a torque and alignment measurement system, used to monitor large rotating couplings in industrial applications. This system works by receiving signals from electronics buried inside a rotating coupling (via rotary transformers), and scales and displays the torque, power, RPM, and information about the alignment of the coupling. The board is based on the use of an ADuC834 microcontroller (from Analog Devices), along with a 500 gate FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) from Altera. The use of the gate array has allowed this system to be adapted to a wide variety of applications; when systems requirements change, the FPGA can simply be reprogrammed, thereby saving development time and resources. The board also contains several serial interfaces, and three D/A output channels with protected and buffered 4-20mA outputs that can withstand overvoltage or reverse voltage faults to +/- 200 volts. I2C Project
The tiny board on the left was a demonstration project which showed how an ADuC824 microcontroller could be used to transparently enhance and augment the functions of a standard I2C peripheral chip. In this application, the customer was committed to using a particular I2C chip which lacked several key functions and features. The ADuC was used to interpose between this peripheral chip and the I2C bus, in order to transparently add additional functions. This required the ADuC824 to be programmed to act as both an I2C master, as well as an I2C slave. While the ADuC824 is already equipped to act as an I2C master, it is not designed to act as a slave; therefore, it was necessary to add a few discrete logic IC's, and devise a particularly difficult program, to make the system work. Industrial Data Acquisition IC
The device on the right was an industrial data acquisition IC, consisting of two separate die, with chip-to-chip bonding, in a single surface mount package. One die was a commercial microcontroller. The other was a custom mixed-mode front end IC containing a high resolution integrating A/D converter, along with industrial signal conditioning for thermocouples, RTD's, millivolt and voltage input signals. This was the first monolithic product to have fully protected (or easily protectable) inputs that could withstand substantial overvoltage faults, a characteristic that is often important in industrial data acquisition. The firmware in the microcontroller was programmed to linearize, scale, excite, and compensate 11 different thermocouple types and 4 different RTD types, using floating point math and eighth order polynomial linearization. 'Tiny Temp' Demonstration Board
The board at the left was a demonstration board, hundreds of which were given away at various trade shows, intended to demonstrate the versatility and low power requirements of the ADuC824 Microcontroller from Analog Devices. The board (which was exactly the size of a standard business card) could display temperature to 0.1 degree resolution, based on either the temperature sensor internal to the ADuC824, or optionally, based on a platinum RTD. In addition, the board was able to log the temperature every five minutes to the ADuC824's internal data FLASH array. An optional Windows applications program (written by Marisystems) could be used to offload the logged data to a PC for display on a graph.
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