Class overview:

There is a strong need in industry for students who are capable of working in the highly multi-disciplinary area of embedded control software development. The performance metrics of an embedded control system lie in the analog physical world, yet the performance limiting component of the system is often the embedded microprocessor. The standard college education does not produce students with expertise in both areas, and students with expertise in one area often do not possess the conceptual framework required to understand issues that arise in the other.

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EECS 461: Embedded Control Systems is a senior/first year graduate level course in the subject that teaches students from diverse backgrounds the fundamentals of the subject. We use technology relevant to the local automotive industry, including the Freescale MPC 5553 microcontroller and a CAN network. We also use Mathworks tools, Matlab, Simulink, Stateflow, and Real Time Workshop for modeling, analysis, and (in the last stage of the course) autocode generation. We develop an embedded controller for a haptic interface, or force feedback system, built by Professor Brent Gillespie of the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Michigan.

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Labs:

During the first several weeks of the semester, the laboratory exercises will develop an embedded controller for a haptic interface. The software will be written in C. We will implement the controller over a CAN network to study performance degradation due to networking delay. We will then recreate our work using rapid prototyping tools to generate C code directly from a Simulink model of the haptic virtual world. We shall structure the generated code as task states in the OSEKTurbo real time operating system.

Each lab teaches a peripheral on the MPC5553, a signals and systems concept, Labs 1-7: program in C, and Lab 8: autocode generation.
Lab 1: Familiarization and digital I/O
Lab 2: Quadrature decoding using the eTPU
Lab 3: Queued A-D conversion
Lab 4: Pulse Width Modulation and virtual worlds without time
Lab 5: Interrupt timing and frequency analysis of PWM signals
Lab 6: Virtual worlds with time.
Lab 7: Controller Area Network (CAN)
Lab 8: Rapid Prototyping

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