Cellular phone control application as an undergraduate research project

Abstract

As technology advances, items like the cell phone have become an integral part of people's everyday lives. Finding new innovative ways to incorporate devices like cellphones into our lives can help improve both productivity and efficiency, and can help reduce the cost associated with the purchase of other, more expensive technologies. Creating a smart phone application that can remotely control motor speed is a demonstration of the capabilities of wireless technology that could lead to many other similar applications of this technology. This undergraduate research project uses smart phone technology as a control device by demonstrating that it can be used to control the rotational speed of a DC motor. Specifically, this project will involve the development of a fast and real time method to control a device that is readily available to the public and relatively easy and inexpensive to implement in industry. A smart phone application will be created using a graphical user interface (GUI) that represents the controls of a motor. The brand of smart phone must accept custom programmed applications. The smart phone will be programmed to interpret GUI inputs and create wireless signals. The hardware used to create and transmit the wireless signals will be pre-existing in the phone and common to most phones available in the market. An embedded control system will receive the wireless signals from the smart phone and interpret those signals as a desired motor output speed. Separate intelligent hardware devices will likely be needed, one for receiving and translating the wireless signal into a commonly used networking language, and a second device used to interpret the control signals and drive the motor. The motor speed will be varied by a pulse width modulated signal generated in the second device that will likely require a transistor to switch the high currents required to spin the motor. Creating a control system that interacts with signals generated with common devices can have several uses throughout industry. This work can extend to all areas of automated measurement, instrumentation, and controls. One potential outcome is the elimination of the need for expensive human-machine interfaces (HMIs) at the monitored equipment, thereby significantly reducing overall equipment costs. The benefits and limitations of incorporating this effort into an undergraduate engineering or engineering technology curriculum will then be explored. Among the issues to be addressed are the technical (hardware and software) capabilities required of both the students and faculty to enable cell phone technology to be employed in control and communication systems courses. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2013.