Study And Implementation Of IEEE 1451 Based Network Capable Application Processor

Transducers(Sensors or actuators) are ubiquitous. They are used in a variety of applications that touch people's lives every day, ranging from industrial automation to environmental condition monitoring and control to intelligent transportation systems to homeland defense. One direction of transducer development is smart transducer, which consists of four parts: transducers, signal conditioning and data conversion, application processor and network communication. Smart transducer can transport the data collected to monitor device via field bus, as well as receive commands from the monitor. However, there are many different standards of field bus, which lead to incompatitably problem of different smart transducers and inconvenience and waste to transducer producer, developer and consumer. IEEE 1451 is proposed to solve the above problems. It unifies the interface between transducers, with which the design of transducer becomes independent of field bus and transducers can interactive with others conveniently. Also, Network capable application processor (NCAP) can communicate with different transducers with a common set of commands and provide a standard interface to the user via any arbitrary network.At first we make a deeply discussion of the IEEE1451 standard, we mainly focus on IEEE 1451.0 and IEEE1451.5. The IEEE 1451.0 standard defines a set of common functionality, commands, and Transducer Electronic Data Sheet, while IEEE1451.5 defines a transducer-to-NCAP interface and TEDS for wireless transducers. Then we discuss wireless protocol ZigBee, and introduce the corresponding hardware module. In the paper, Ethernet works as the media between NCAP and the user, so we discuss the implementation of an embedded TCP/IP protocol stack in detail. Based on the above discussions, we implement IEEE 1451.0 and IEEE 1451.5 in NCAP. Finally we design user software to observe and test our design of IEEE1451 standard.