Programmable AC power supply using class D amplifier with remote GUI

2018 ELE Engineering Design Project (DX03)

---

Faculty Lab Coordinator

David Xu

Topic Category

Power / Controls

Preamble

Power converter system usually requires a human interface to accept users' command input and display status of the converter operation. Most of the converters employ simple character LCD and push buttons as the main components. The information is limited by the size of the display. On the other side, graphic use interface on PC becomes an effective solution to the power converters, which can display most of the important information on the screen. It significantly improves the reliability of the user interface.

Objective

The objective of this project is to design a remote GUI software for programmable AC supply. The program accepts the user input and send the command through ethernet to the supply side. The supply side send the real-time data to the PC for waveform display

Partial Specifications

The specifications of the GUI are following:
1) The GUI should allow voltage/frequency input as well as the waveform
2) The GUI should be able to display the waveform of the supply output
3) The GUI should communicate with the supply to send the commmand and receive the waveform data
4) Interface circuit to the supply board.

Suggested Approach

The class D amplifier is provided in this project. The suggested approach on the supply side is to build a MCU with other circuit, which include:
1) a sensor circuit to synchronously measure the voltage/current of amplifier output based on the input frequency.
2) a DAC for the reference voltage waveform from the commands sent by GUI and feed the reference to the amplifier input.
3) an ethernet communication with the GUI.
On the PC side, a program should be developed to accept user input and display the waveforms

Group Responsibilities

The group should be responsible for the project management, demo and project report

Student A Responsibilities

Student A should be responsible for the measurement system, which is used to measure the output voltage/current of the amplifier. Student A also should be responsible for the MCU with ADC and DAC to translate the digital signal into analog.

Student B Responsibilities

Student B is responsible for ethernet communication on the MCU platform, including proper coding.

Student C Responsibilities

Student C should be responsible for the program of the GUI on PC side.

Course Co-requisites