Research On A Control Terminal For Portable Digital Fluxgate

The magnetic prospecting technique is an effective mean to explore the mineral resources. As the exploration staff usually works in the field environment, a kind of portable device is desperately needed. Not only that it is easy to operate and can satisfy all the needs of mineral exploration, but also it will make exploration job in the wild becomes easier. Besides, it helps to decrease the amount of equipment they needed and reduce the influence of the magnetic field brought by them.Based on the background, this thesis designed a reliable and portable control terminal for a fluxgate sensor. This sensor consists of three parts, the fluxgate sensor probes, the electronics unit and the control terminal, the probes and the electronics units are designed by the other senior engineers. The control terminal software and hardware solution support write magnetic data to the files in SD card, and provide magnetic data curves of three directions in recent ten minutes. In addition, the user is able to read real-time data from LCD, network interface or the serial interface, configure the device by touchscreen. The users can also achieve the above functions through the browser.The hardware of this system includes an ARM processor and Peripherals such as network port, SD card, serial port, pushbutton on/off controller and so on. The software platform works on the Linux system based on the hardware platform, according the demands, this thesis designed software in the u-boot layer, linux kernel layer, and application layer. In application layer, this thesis designed a graphical interface of man-machine interaction with QT. It supports functions like data storage, data read and machine configure. Additionally, the terminal is configured to be a web server an ftp server, so the users can get the magnetic data and working status of the machine on the web pages, they can also download the files in the SD card.The device is also configured be a tcp server, the users can program their own tcp client to control the device.With the probe, electronics unit and the control terminal which is designed by the thesis, the principle prototype of digital fluxgate sensor is realized. The whole system has the features of portable, light weighted, easy operation etc. The exploration staff can configure the device and analyze the Magnetic field anytime and anywhere.