A PCI Based Aerospace Camera Testing System Implementation For Real-time Analysis And Evaluation

Since the 60's from the last century, digital technology has been applied to aviation electronic equipment. In order to overcome the different interface's communication issues between various devices, the U.S. military has formulated a variety of avionics data bus standard. The most popular are 1553 series and ARINC series, which standardize avionics data bus.The full name of 1553B is digital time division command/response multiples data bus. The main feature includes distributed processing, centralized control and real-time response, and the reliability of fault tolerance mechanisms includes error prevention, error detection and localization, system monitoring and system recovery. Currently 1553B bus has been widely used in aircraft avionics system, and gradually extended to fields such as tanks, ships, satellites, and space flight. PCI (Peripheral Component Interface) local bus, proposed by Intel since 1991, has become the standard bus on PC, while PCI Express is already popular, but in general PCI meet the application's requirements.Aerospace camera as the payload on space vehicle platform communicates with PDHU (Payload Data Handling Unit) to exchange data in real time through 1553B bus. To shorten the development cycle and ensure product quality, in the development of aerospace cameras a variety of simulated test equipments are being used to fully test the camera's performance on the ground ahead of time. PCI and 1553B bus based real-time simulation test system, modular design was used on lower computer, specific interface chips were used to complete the real-time part. SOPC based embedded NIOS II processor and peripherals were used to complete control logic overcoming the general test equipment's inflexibility and non-real-time shortcomings.In this paper popular avionics bus technology was studied, hardware and software schemes of PCI and 1553B based real-time simulation test system were proposed, process of debugging the encountered hardware and software problems and solutions were described.