Is it possible to send realtime commands from PC to PLC - simulation

We are using a frequency inverter to power a servo motor. This has to be programmed using PLC. Is it possible to gather data from a running program, using values from that to control the movements / frequency of the inverter?
(as an example; We built a racing game, we'd like to build a simulation chair that can support a grown person and act on accelaration / braking etc in the game)
Thanks

Yes, I believe what your asking is possible. I personally use a VB script running on a PC to write to registers in a PLC... so that's one way to do it.

Related

Costume linux scheduler for Raspberry pi

I am using Raspberry pi and I want to get a digital sign when a specific process runs, to trigger another measurement tools (e.g oscilloscope or spectrum analyzer) to start measure things.
I didn't find any workaround to do it (If you know any please share) so I want to create a costume scheduler.
My plan is to create a process with special priority and whenever the process gets CPU time I want to turn on a GPIO and when the process is preempted I want to turn off the GPIO.
How would you recommend to start implementing it? are there any existing open source projects which did something similar?
Any help would be appreciated.

RPi Pyaudio/Portaudio + ALSA: How to select/change mux inputs

I'm working on a project that is using a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian and an SGTL5000 based sound card (FePi.) I have no problem selecting the card and getting samples in both directions - once I have configured the multiplexer to properly select line In/Out. I did this with Alsamixer. I want to automate the process so that the only step required is to run the application.
I don't see a way to do this using PyAudio/PortAudio. Is my only option the ALSA API or is there a way to do this with PyAudio (or PortAudio) that I'm not spotting?
Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide.
Oz (in DFW)
I ran into a similar problem, I wanted to automate changing mux settings but I wanted to adjust inputs not exposed by alsamixer too.
To deal with the limitations of the driver I ended up porting over the Teensy 3.x sgtl5000 control software to the pi yesterday
https://github.com/Swap-File/pi-sgtl5000
You could force feed the same commands via i2c via python.
The only downside is, once you start force feeding the sound card i2c commands, you break alsamixer (and anything else that might try to adjust it's own volume settings).

Raspberry Pi iBeacon Scan Parsing Response

I have used the raspberry pi to detect the ibeacons and gone through the tutorial provided by Radius Networks here. I made a small script that first turns on lescan and redirects output to /dev/null. Then it turns the hcidump on piping to the output to the script.
The output shown by the script is slow. While the advertisement packets are transmitted in magnitude of milliseconds, the result however on the terminal is slow. consequently, the command keeps on showing new output even if you turn off the transmitter. My understanding tells me that parsing takes its time, while the HCIDUMP data waits in the sed queue.
For proper action to trigger according to proximity, minimum parsing time is necessary so that all packets are parsed as they are received.
Have i missed something or parsing is faster if one uses the bluetooth development kit provided by Radius Networks? if so, what makes it faster?
Thanks,
You are correct, the output of the script does lag behind when detecting a large magnitude of iBeacon advertisements. The parsing script was written in bash for simplicity, and its speed suffers as a result -- piping to sed to store each identifier is slow and inefficient. The script was rewritten in Ruby for the Beacon Development Kit (now called the PiBeacon) and is much faster and more responsive. Ruby and other high-level level programming languages are more well suited for parsing and converting the raw iBeacon packet data. A disk image of the development kit with this new script is available to download here.
You can also try implementing another iBeacon Raspberry Pi scanning script, written in Python, that can be found here. I have yet to try this out myself, but it appears to be another good solution.

Recording multi-channel audio input in real-time

I am trying to perform Time Difference of Arrival in real-time using the PS3 Eye. Since it has a built-in 4 microphone array, I've successfully rearranged the array into a square array and cross-correlated the signals using MATLAB to obtain a relatively accurate TDOA algorithm. However, so far I've been recording the signal, saving the files (4 individual files for each microphone in the array), and then feeding those files into MATLAB to read after-the-fact.
My problem is: MATLAB doesn't recognize the PS3 Eye's microphones separately; it only recognizes it as a whole. So far, Audacity is one of the few programs that actually works well in doing so, but I am inexperienced in using the program and don't know its real-time capabilities. Anyone have suggestions as to how can I can perform real-time signal analysis in this manner? If using something else besides the PS3 Eye would work better, then I am open to suggestions. Thanks.
I know very little about MATLAB or PS3 eye, but various hardware microphones allow you to capture a single audio stream containing multiple (typically 2) channels. The audio data will come to you in frames, each frame containing a single sample for each channel.
I'm not really sure what you mean by "recognizes as a whole", but I assume you mean MATLAB is mixing the channels so that the device only produces one usable channel. If you can capture the channels to file, and they all originate from the same device (i.e. hardware clock), you should be fine except that this solution is not "realtime".
There is a similar discussion on Sound Exchange which ends up suggesting the Microcone. There are a variety of other products, from microphone arrays to digital mixers for analog mic sources, also, but your question seems to be mainly about how to get the data with software.
In short, make sure you are seeing a single device with multiple channels. This will ensure each channel uses the same hardware clock and will prevent drift issues.
This is just a wild guess as I don't know know about MATLAB real time input options.
Maybe try reaper ( http://www.reaper.fm/ ).. it has great multi track capabilities and you can extend it (I think the scripting language is python ). Nice documentation and third party contributions, OSC and Rewire support. So maybe you could think of routing the audio to reaper, doing some data normalization there in python and then route data to MATLAB.
Or you could use PURE DATA which is open source and very open, with lots of patches (basic processing units) that you could probably put together.
HTH
BTW I am in no way affiliated wit reaper or PD.
EDIT: you might also want to consider supercollider (http://supercollider.github.io/) or Chuck (http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/)
Here's a lead, but I haven't been able to test it, yet.
On Windows, you can record a single 4 track ogg audio file from the Eye with Audacity (using the WASAPI driver selection).
As of 23 Jul 2014, the pa-wavplay for 32-bit and 64-bit MEX supports WASAPI. You will have to rebuild the PortAudio library to select the WASAPI interface as described here and get all four tracks in MatLab (in Windows).
Sadly, if you're not on Windows, I don't have any suggestions. Adjusting the PortAudio build might help, but I only know that WASAPI works with the Eye.

Can an NXT brick really be programmed with Enchanting and adaption of Scratch?

I want my students to use Enchanting a derivative of Scratch to program Mindstorm NXT robots to drive a pre-programmed course, follow a line and avoid obstacles. (Two state, five state and proportional line following.) Is Enchanting developed enough for middle school students to program these behaviors?
I'm the lead developer on Enchanting, and the answer is: Yes, definitely.
The video demoing Enchanting 0.0.4 shows how to make a proportional line follower (and you could extend it to use a PID controller, if you wish). If you download the latest version, 0.2.2, it includes a sample showing a two-state line follower (and you can see a video and download code here). You, or with some instruction / playing around, a middle-schooler, can readily create a program to do n-states, and, especially if you follow a behaviour-oriented approach, you can avoid obstacles at the same time.
As far as I know, yes and no.
What Scratch does with its sensor board, Lego Wedo, and the S4A - Scratch for Arduino - version as well as, I believe, with NXT is basically use its remote sensor protocol - it exchanges messages on TCP port 42001.
A client written to interface that port with an external system allows communication of messages and sensor data. Scratch can pick up sensor state and pass info to actuators, every 75ms according to the S4A discussion.
But that isn't the same as programming the controller - we control the system remotely, which is already very nice, but we're not downloading a program in the controller (the NXT brick) that your robot can use to act independently when it is disconnected.
Have you looked into 12blocks? http://12blocks.com/ I have been using it for Propeller and it's great and it has the NXT option (I have not tested)
It's an old post, but I'll answer anyway.
Enchanting looks interesting, and seems to be still an active project.
I would actually take the original Scratch (1.4), as it's is more familiar and reliable.
It's easy to interface hardware with Scratch using the remote sensor protocol. I use a simple serial interface (over a USB-adapter) which provides 3 digital inputs and 3 digital outputs. With that, it's possible to implement projects such as traffic lite, light/water/heat-sensors, using only lets, resistors, reed-contacts, photo-transistors, switches, PTSs.
The costs are < 5$
For some motor-based projects like factory belts, elevator, etc. There is not much more required, a battery and a couple of transistors/relais/motor driver.