User guide

3
Introduction
In the increasingly competitive market of today, efficiency is a very important issue.
Many tasks previously requiring human intervention are now performed automatically,
with the use of embedded systems. Companies can benefit form this, since they require
less personal for completing the same tasks.
These tasks can be centralizing data from different sources to a central database, which
mean that they require collecting the data, processing it, and sending it to a remote
location. Moreover, the source of the data may be located in an isolated area where there
is no access to a computer or Internet connection.
Developing such a system from scratch requires a lot of effort, time and money. In our
project we show that it is possible to develop such an infrastructure using standard
available units like PDAs, FPGA boards with little or no changes at all in a short period
of time. For our project, we used:
• Altera FPGA development board
• Palm IIIxe (with IR and serial communication capabilities)
• External modem
Some possible scenarios where such system could be used are:
The FPGA board with sensors collects the data for some period of time (i.e. changes of
outdoor temperature for a week). We can put multiple boards in different places, where
there are no means of transmitting data continuously (no fiber-optic cables, Ethernet or
phone connections). Once a week a person visits those sensors, downloads all data to
Palm, and after coming back connects the Palm to the Internet, and Palm automatically
uploads everything to a server.
The board can be used to monitor certain activities, collect the data and transmit it via IR
link to Palm. The Palm periodically uploads the data on a specific server on Internet, via
modem connection. If a critical condition occurs and it is detected by Palm, it can go into
a different state where it first sends an alert through Internet and then it either remains
connected waiting for further instructions (from a human person) or it resumes its normal
execution cycle.
As it is shown in the figure below, for demonstration purposes we decided to limit our
project to a system that performs the following tasks:
• measures temperature with a sensor connected to the FPGA board;
• sends temperature values to the Palm via IR link, without storing them on the
board;
• processes the data on Palm:
o performs error correction;
o plots graph with temperature variation over time;
o sends warning e-mail messages when temperature exceeds certain
threshold values;