| The tremendous progress of modern marine automation benefits from electronics, sensors, communications and computer technology. The embedded system technology is an important branch of computer technology, at present, has been applied in many fields such as information appliance, industrial control, automotive electronic and so on, and also brings opportunities and vitality to the field of marine automation. The embedded system not only has functions and features of the general computer system, but also has excellent performance in reliability, real-time, structure and size. The modern marine automatic systems are developing towards intelligent, digital and networked. Because of many of its advantages, the embedded system can meet the requirements of the further development of marine automatic systems adequately, and will become the development trend of a new generation marine automation system. This paper just studies on the application of embedded systems technology in marine automation systems.The application of embedded system technology includes two parts—hardware and software. Mostly, the automatic control systems of new generation's marine electrical and mechanical equipments have a control device based on computer technology as core control unit. The embedded controller, which has a high-performance microprocessor, via the design of the external circuit, has rich functions in communication, storage, expansion interface and other peripheral equipment; it can also run a multi-task real-time operating system scheduling tasks and resources. The embedded controller can be the core control unit of the monitoring system of marine electrical and mechanical equipments.The whole process of developing a embedded system includes the design and development of hardware, BSP,crop and transplant of operating system, and the design of application programs. The BSP development also concludes three parts, boot loader, OAL and the driver.Following the developing trend of monitoring system in modern ships, this paper, according to the characteristic on marine automation system, designed an embedded controller applied to the ship's cabin monitoring system based on a kind of system on chip microprocessor, EP9315, and Windows CE embedded operator system. The controller has many functions, including data acquisition and processing, data storage, communications functions, etc.Based on Microsoft's integrated development environment, Platform Builder 5.0, the paper accomplished the development of BSP and customization and transplantation of operating system after the design of hardware. Then, this paper puts forward the system architecture of embedded marine power plant monitoring system based on the controller, and also gives the commputer program on data acquisition and Ethernet communication in the test platform.The content of this paper emphasized particularly on the development process of hardware and software, besides, implementing methods of data acquisition and output control based on serial communications, and Ethernet communications based on Sockets, at the platform of Windows CE, aiming to describe the application of embedded system technology in ship automation system, especially, to illustrate the general means and characteristics of the embedded controller,which is in standardization, modularization, and cyberization, applied in monitoring system. |
