Documentation and setup tools

The home page gathers the reference material in one place: the SmartRCP documentation, the Interface manual, a set of step-by-step Quick Start guides available in English, Spanish and Chinese, and the example videos. The configurations opened most recently are listed beside them.

Two bench utilities are included. A network scan reports the SmartRCP units that answer on the local network, together with their identity, MAC address and IP address. A guided form writes the uSD configuration file, so the network parameters and the identity of a unit do not have to be edited by hand.

Rapid system monitoring

The Overview page monitors the operation state of the SmartRCP, its active alarms, the measured signals and any other control variable, in a fully customizable way. Numeric readouts and history plots are presented together, so a value can be read at an instant and followed over time on the same page.

Which signals appear as numeric readouts, which ones are plotted, how the plots are distributed and how much history each one retains are defined by the user. The arrangement can be modified while the system is running, without interrupting the acquisition.

ADC Configuration

The 24 ADC channels available in SmartRCP are configured from a single page:

• Gain and offset of each channel.
• Upper and lower limit of each protection.
• Cut-off frequency of the low-pass filter of each channel.
• Name of each channel, and whether its instantaneous, RMS or average value is shown in Overview.

PL and PS registers

The registers carry values between the interface and the application running on the platform, so control changes — controller gains, switching frequency, dead time, and any other parameter of the design — are applied online, without rebuilding the user application for each test.

The interface provides 32 write registers and 32 read registers on the programmable logic side (PL), and 64 write registers on the processing system side (PS), available to the processor cores. Each register takes a name defined by the user and is interpreted as an integer or as a floating-point value.

PL registers: values sent to the programmable logic and values read back from it.

PS/core registers: processor-side variables available to the other cores.

Embedded Oscilloscope

The interface includes the Embedded Oscilloscope for the acquisition and analysis of the internal signals of the control: measured signals, control variables and register values.

• 6 simultaneous channels, 2500 samples per channel.
• Sample step configurable from 50 ns, the acquisition period of the platform.
• Single or continuous acquisition, with a configurable trigger level.
• Time-domain and frequency-domain representation, with a distributable plotting area.
• Zoom and cursors for time and amplitude measurements.
• Derived signals obtained from mathematical operations between channels, including FFT.
• Captures saved to file and loaded again for later analysis.

Zoom on the region of interest of the capture.

Cursors measuring time and amplitude.

Derived signals from mathematical operations and FFT.

Alarms and protections

Each ADC channel has an upper and a lower protection limit, and a message can be defined for each of the two. When a protection trips, the interface identifies the channel involved and reports the event with that message, in the terms of the application rather than as a generic code.

The protection is rearmed from the interface itself once the cause has been examined. The event log keeps a timestamped record of every event.