Prototype for thesis - tarjet selection, help!

[electronic-tree]

Hi, I'm doing my thesis is about a prototype of a greenhouse, the area is as follows: 9.8 feet (long) x 4.9 feet (wide) x 6.56 feet (high). I am going to buy a card to develop an embedded system in which the logic of control and monitoring, temperature, humidity, and irrigation system will be programmed. My question is, which platform would you use for this type of projects? nexys 4, zybo zynq-7000 or other?, what advantages would the platform they select, with the same development with a fpga digilent card as NI MYRIO or single rio board ?, I hope they can help.

-Time limit between 300 and 700 dollars for the card
-The signals to measure 8 temperature signals (2), relative humidity (2), conductivity (2), ph (2).
- need to control 4 actuators irrigation system (1), ventilation system (2), radiator (1)
-For the monitoring will be a user session interface.
- It is necessary to register about 9 data, mentioned above and additionally the speed of time.
"Supervision will be done from my laptop.

[jpeyron]

Hi @electronic-tree,

Could you be more specific on how many digital/analog I/O pins you would be looking to use as well as types of communication protocols(spi,uart,I2C). Have you looked into our Openscope(microcontroller) here. I also moved your thread to section where more forum members would look.

cheers,

Jon

[Notarobot]

@electronic-tree

In order to make informed decision you need to define I/O requirements: interfaces with actuators, computer, sensors, total number of lines.

In my opinion using any FPGA for such slow and trivial application is an overkill. Any processor board will be able to do everything. Besides there are plenty of open source projects and libraries available. I would add ZigBee to make the system wireless and solar panel for recharging. Also my choice would be a board which has the most of examples and documentation. This will free you for working on control algorithms and data storage instead of solving hardware issues.

Good luck!

[Valiree194]

On 6/30/2017 at 2:47 AM, jpeyron said:

Hi @electronic-tree,

Could you be more specific on how many digital/analog I/O pins you would be looking to use as well as types of communication protocols(spi,uart,I2C). Have you looked into our Openscope(microcontroller) here. I also moved your thread to section where more forum members would look. 

cheers,

Jon 

Thanks! Might be useful as a module for building into some other equipment, if there's a simple API for controlling it.

[xc6lx45]

>> embedded system

How about a Raspberry PI with wiringPi library, and e.g. some SPI modules?

An FPGA is definitely not the tool of choice...

[zygot]

1 hour ago, xc6lx45 said:

How about a Raspberry PI

My first impulse would be to investigate a uC software solution for such a project; especially if your FPGA development experience is limited. I love solving problems with an FPGA but it isn't always the most sensible way to go. There are a number of inexpensive boards like the Raspberry Pi an adding a cheap interface of your own design could be fairly easy. Texas Instruments offers some cheap Piccolo DSP development boards and a nice software development platform. Keep It SSimple... or perhaps I should say keep the demonstration development as simple as possible so that you have the time to  concentrate on making the demonstration as impressive as possible.

[edit] If you have the skill and just want to do an FPGA based platform the CMOD can be easily be connected to a breadboard or custom PCB interface (Express PCB is one that I have experience with) supporting connection interfaces to all of the sensors and actuators  that you need. Despite its deficiencies I still use my CMOD-A7 modules and just work around the issues. There are other inexpensive FPGA boards with a lot of IO as an alternative.