Elevator Control System

11/15/09 Lab5 EET341 Chris Dunleavy Josh Lynch

Purpose: The purpose of this lab is to design, and evaluate, an elevator control system utilizing LabView. The elevator must be able to go to any of the three floors when selected from one of those three floors. The program must use a daq to interface the inputs and outputs of an external circuit with a program formed in LabView.

Summary: The first thing that was needed to be done in this lab was the design an external circuit and a LabView program. This was done by using a breadboard to hold the external circuit that has push buttons and allows for the user to hook up a model elevator to it. The board then connects to the digital daq card that is then inputted into the computer which interfaces with the LabView program. Then by utilizing LabView the user is able to run the elevator while also seeing what floor the elevator is at. The program also allows you to see whether the elevator doors are open or close. All of this together allows for the user to see the elevator working both in front of them and on the computer screen. The program was achieved by utilizing many LabView functions. The function we used most of all was the math script node. This allowed us to build various if else statements to select what floor the elevator should go to; along with a switch case statement to make sure only one command would be followed at a time. There was also much use for a while loop and case statements. Once we did this we used a various amount of feedback nodes to allow our elevator to continue in its direction until its supposed to stop. The feedback loops were used to return the values for the floor selected and for the elevator movements. This allowed for the elevator selection to stay selected without the user holding in the button. It also allowed for the elevator to keep moving until it had reached the floor that it was called to. In addition we also used another mathscript node for a case selector. This allowed us to divvy up the program so that the elevator wouldnt go crazy after one input was selected. By separating the floor operations one is able to achieve a more stable running program. At the beginning of the program was placed a case statement that took care of the doors actions. The doors went first that way the value would be retained until the loop came back around on the whole program. This only happened once one function was completed,

which is when the elevator reaches a floor and is exactly when we wanted the doors to open and close.

Problems: This program had presented a lot of problems at first. There was the initial problem that is faced with all programs, where to start, as well as what would be the best way to program the whole thing and how to interface it. To face the first problem, where to start, we decided to stick to our strengths and build the program with a mathscript node. As far as interfacing goes the daq assistant function in LabView had become very handy. The daq assistant allowed us to interface with the digital I/O after only a few clicks of the mouse. We were able to use this to set up both the input and output ports on the daq card. One of the biggest problems faced was how to get the mathscript node to retain a value that was selected until another one was selected. This problem was easily fixed by utilizing feedback loops. The feedback loops allowed us to return the value that had been previously selected so that the elevator would in turn keep moving until it reached its destination. The biggest problem that we faced in this lab was trying to get the doors to effectively open and close whenever the elevator reached the chosen floor. We solved this by putting a true false case statement at the beginning of the program. This allowed for the doors to be executed before the rest of the problem, which allowed for them to work because the value was retained until the loop returned to the case statement which was when the elevator had reached a floor, which is exactly when we needed to be executed.

Data: The following is an overview of our LabView program. As one can see it utilizes a series of mathscript nodes along with daq assistants. In the first image you can see the front panel of the program, and the second is the block diagram. In addition to this program there is also a breadboard that is external from the computer. This board has an h bridge on it and is hooked up to push buttons so that the user can call the elevator via external push buttons to any of the three floors. The floor indicator tells you what floor the elevator is on both by digital indicator and by an eight segment led display. The text box shows you what floor has been called and that is the

floor that the elevator is currently travelling to. In addition to all this are two led lights that indicate whether the doors are opening up or if there closing, this occurs whenever the elevator stops at a designated floor.