IEEE INDICON 2015 1570174217

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Development of Smart Human Machine Interface

for Solar Powered Appliances
Sonal Jain

Neeraj Khera
Astt. Prof., Department of E.C.E
A.S.E.T, Amity University
Uttar Pradesh, India

M. Tech. Student, Department of E.C.E

A.S.E.T, Amity University
Uttar Pradesh, India
Abstract This paper presents a low cost smart human machine
interface (HMI) solution designed for solar powered home
appliances and industrial units. The underlying concept behind the
design and development of such a device is the growing convergence
between communication equipment, appliances and industrial
devices. A large number of appliance and industrial manufacturers
now need advanced control and insights into their existing solutions
for providing added ergonomics in their product and increase overall
customer interest and therefore the product life. The HMI solution
developed here is one such platform which has the ability to be
integrated to a variety of logging, connectivity, monitoring, control
and e-commerce based web applications. Certain individual
hardware and software modules can be added to the existing HMI to
enhance functionality.

contents of random access memory (RAM) data frame to the

display panel while consuming less than two percent of
available processors bandwidth.
II.

SYSTEM DESCRIPTION

Renesas provides Direct Drive LCD drivers and Graphics API

to work upon the TFT-LCD in cost effective manner for HMI
solution design for embedded control system. The major
requirements of HMI design are TFT-LCD touch screen board,
Renesas RX62N development board, E1 Debugger and HighPerformance Embedded Workshop [7]. The Renesas RX62N
development board is shown in Fig. 1 below,

Keywords external direct memory access controller; human

machine interface; microcontroller; real time operating system;
thin film transistor liquid crystal display

I.

INTRODUCTION

uman machine interface is the platform for cognition

and communication between human and machine, and
it is the approach for information transmittal[1]. Human
machine interface (HMI) is widely used in control systems
for providing visualization to the running process [2], [3].
HMI solution can be implemented on simple LED indicator
or as graphical user interface (GUI) using thin film transistor
(TFT) - liquid crystal display (LCD) based touch screen
interface [4], [5]. These applications require resistance to
dust, water and moisture; high robustness; sometimes
authentic communication and also a huge range of
temperature. In this paper presents the essential requirements
of firmware design for a direct drive TFT-LCD implemented
over Renesas RX62N microcontroller. The design is focused
on the template designing, tool chain, animation,
functionality and selection. It has been reported in [6] that the
efficiencies of the practical work changing with the time spans
of contiguous visual data terminal (VDT) operation for the
TFT-LCD device is more than the CRT display device. Direct
drive TFT-LCD has the ability to operate it from on chip
peripherals interfaced with microcontrollers. These peripherals
include external bus controller (ExDMAC), external direct
memory access (DMA) controller and also the timer units. The
application program interface (API) of TFT-LCD can transfer

Fig.1. RX62N development board

The proposed system has been developed to provide a reliable

and low cost solution for driving the TFT panels for their use
in HMI application for solar powered appliances. The
connection of RX62N development board with the external
peripherals and TFT panel and in system programming (ISP)
and debugging is shown in Fig. 2,

978-1-4673-6540-6/15/$31.00 2015 IEEE

#define DD_V_LINES_FRON
NT_PORCH 2
// Horizontal pulse width
E 41
#define DD_H_DOT_PULSE
Hsync active till display
// Horizontal back porch (dot clocks
c
data)
#define DD_H_DOT_BACK__PORCH 2
// Horizontal front porch (post data
d till Hsync inactive)
Fig.2 Connection of development board with perripheral and ISP

T_PORCH 2
#define DD_H_DOT_FRONT
#define
16000000L

From Figure 2, the microcontroller unit in development

d
board
can directly access the peripherals and thee internal memory
with the help of internal buses when at thhe same time TFT
panel is getting refreshed externally from extternal peripherals.
The block diagram of the proposed HMI syystem is shown in
Fig. 3.

LOCK_FREQUENCY_DATA
DD_DOT_CL

wn in Fig. 4.
The system architecture is show

m architecture
Fig.4. System

III.

SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION

High-Performance Embeddded Workshop software is used

as integrated development envvironment (IDE) for Windows
for software development, teesting and debugging of HMI
easy, convenient and
applications for RX62N. It provides
p
seamless development. It faciilitates the user by the smooth
access of four major steps; Coding-Compiling-Linkingdebugging. The running state of the IDE is shown in Fig. 5.

Fig.3. System block diagram

Using the proposed low cost smart human machhine interface (HMI)
solution designed for solar powered home appliaances, the end user
can easily visualize all the necessary detaills and settings on
the LCD and can also configure the poweer control settings
according to the requirements.
FT-LCD are: back
The timing parameters of the direct drive TF
porch, pulse width, front porch and dot clocck frequency. The
values of above parameters for the TFT-LC
CD panel, FRIDA
LCD (FRD430B4004) are given in their resppective files as,
// Vertical pulse width (inactive pulse width)
#define DD_V_LINES_PULSE 10
// Vertical back porch (Lines Vsync Active tiill display lines)
#define DD_V_LINES_BACK_PORCH 2
// Minimum Vertical Front Porch (post display
d
till Vsync
inactive)...this may be extended by driver to
t meet requested
behavior

Fig.5. High-Performancce Embedded Workshop

All the coding in IDE has been done using Graphics

Application Program Interface and Graphics libraries. The
TFT-LCD is programmed in such a way that it consists of
various GUI pages which can be navigated easily. The flow of
source code can be seen in Fig. 6.

Fig.7. TFT-LCD Screen HMI for solar powered home appliance unit

The data coming from the PCU is in the form of packet that is
decoded in the source code and then the real time values of all
the parameters are represented on the TFT-LCD panel. These
values are updated every minute to avoid any communication
gap.
IV.

EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

In the above section, the elements required for a direct

drive TFT-LCD panel for developing smart HMI of Solar
PCU for home appliance has been presented along with the
use of above mentioned Software libraries. The final product
including TFT-LCD with Solar PCU is shown in Fig. 8.
Renesas microcontroller provides a wide range of direct
drive drivers along with the GAPI library to work upon
graphics easily and free of cost. The High-Performance
Embedded Workshop is the widely used IDE, compatible with
Renesas microcontroller RX62N which provides large range
of graphics design and libraries.

Fig.6. Flowchart of source code development

This GUI development is the integral part of building an HMI

for a solar powered unit and provides an easy access to the
user and is shown in Fig. 7. The developed HMI application
provides a way to easy access of the solar power control unit
(PCU) by configuring it as back up mode or grid connected
mode. The electrical parameters like Output frequency, Output
Current, Output Voltage, Battery Voltage, Battery Current,
Input Voltage and photovoltaic (PV) parameters are visualized
and recorded for analysis. The user can also analyze the alerts
and percentage of the load consumed and also adjusts the set
points of parameters as per requirement. In Fig. 7, the HOME
screen represents PV, Output, Input and Battery parameters.

Fig.8. Solar PCU supplying inverter with HMI implementation on TFT-LCD

The trend chart of energy consumed in kilowatts-hour

(kWh) per month (for June 2015) can be visualized on
selecting monthly data report as shown Fig. 7. Similarly the
daily and yearly energy consumed details are also represented
on TFT-LCD as shown in Fig. 9 below,

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]

Fig.9. kWh vs. months trend chart

[9]

V.

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE SCOPE

[10]

This paper presents a low cost smart human machine

interface (HMI) solution designed for solar powered home
appliances and industrial units. The main objective of this
work is to create a continuous information obtaining
framework based on embedded system and HMI [8]-[13] for
continuous sharing of the source and load information with the
intended user. Using the HMI, the intended user can adjust the
set points of parameters as per the requirement and it
automatically generates the events to alert the user for any
fault or parametric variation from set point limit. The refresh
time of the data over HMI is at most 1 sec. that ensures
minimum time delay. The cost of the HMI is almost negligible
in comparison to the cost of Solar powered appliances as it is
based on Free RTOS which is open source and also the
features it provides reduces the cost of any external switches
needed in the Solar Devices.
The communication interfaces like GPRS and Wi-Fi can be
further used in the future in order to remotely implement the
human machine interface using the Transmission Control
Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) programming. The
presented low cost smart human machine interface (HMI) can
also be customized to be implemented for the other solar
powered home appliances and industrial units.
HTTP based communication with HMI device via M2M
protocols can be implemented in future using data web
services like Xively, Zapier etc. Xively can be used to base
camp data in the cloud before it is to be routed to different
devices. It uses REST based HTTP communication to securely
send/receive M2M data. The HMI module can be connected to
emails, SMS servers, databases, IT applications and other web
services through Zapier.

[11]

[12]

[13]

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