Low-cost Distributed Embedded Control Systems

This paper presents how a complex distributed control system can be inexpensively achieved using low-cost controllers. These controllers will be interconnected in a network with an open communication bus called CAN. The development of integrated circuit manufacturing technology has increased the power and performance of the microprocessors and microcontrollers as opposed to its price, and if they also have communication capabilities, they can be used to implement low-cost distributed control nodes.Nodes with different computer architectures (from 16 to 32 bits processors) could be combined as long as the complexity of a given application. This approach was tested in a simulated process, using a dsPICTM (Microchip, 2006) microcontroller control implementation, supervised by an XScale microcomputer with a GPL (General Public License) real-time operating system as RTLinux.