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Conventional nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) instruments are large and difficult to carry, which limits their application in fields such as on-site petroleum exploration, food safety, environmental pollution, and quality control. To address this issue, this paper proposes a design of a handheld NMR console. By utilizing an advanced RISC machine (ARM) core construction, field programmable gate array (FPGA) logic design and control program design on a programmable system-on-chip Zynq-7000, the entire handheld NMR console was designed and implemented. After completing the entire design, several basic pulse sequences, including free induction decay (FID), spin echo (SE), and Carr-Purcel1-Meiboom-Gill (CPMG), were tested on a 0.5 T desktop NMR system developed by our research group. The tests validated the correctness of the overall architecture design and the coordination among various modules. The designed NMR console is 10.6 cm long, 6.0 cm wide, and 1.9 cm high, which significantly reduces the size while enhancing the real-time performance of pulse sequence and improving the stability of the console, laying a foundation for further development of portable NMR instruments.

The automated guided vehicle (AGV) is currently used in a wide range of industries. The control system is the core of the AGV, responsible for task assignment, localization, path planning, motion planning, vehicle management, etc. In previous AGV implementations, personal computer, embedded computer, digital signal processor for computing, and programmable logic controller, micro control unit, field programmable gate array for control have been combined to form the whole control system. These solutions can solve common control problems, but they are complex to implement. To simplify the implementation complexity, the following work is presented in this study: (1) a new real-time operating system (RTOS), called Student RTOS, is developed. The RTOS includes memory management, task management, message queue, semaphore, synchronization, and timer, etc.; (2) a control system based on the newly designed RTOS is presented on a single processor; (3) the RTOS and the control system are tested on a newly designed AGV. From the actual test results, the newly designed RTOS and control system can meet the requirements of real-time, functionality, etc., and can effectively replace the original control system composed of multiple device combinations. In addition to running on the ARM Cortex-A processor used in the AGV control system, the RTOS also runs on the ARM Cortex-M and the STM8S (8-bit) processors for more low-end applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the invent of medical expert systems, the demand for efficient innovative techniques in signal processing to detect abnormalities is ever increasing for identifying heart-related problems. The major objective of this research is to offer medical services to people in remote villages at low cost. People in villages and remote areas do not have a facility to get treated by a medical expert. This research provides them an opportunity to get medical advice through the virtual environment called the VH-doctor machine. It is a virtual environment heart doctor and reduces the human effort in testing and treating of heart diseases at the initial stages. The patients are treated and diagnosed only with the help of machines but not human effort. Biomedical sensors, ARM processor and FPGA are used to detect, test, analyze and display normal or abnormal cases. In this research, ECG signal processing, feature extraction and KNN classifier are performed and achieve the highest accuracy of 99% better than other machine learning algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To address the problems of low selling efficiency, poor sanitation conditions, labor-intensive requirement, and quick rice cooling speed in manual rice selling in cafeterias, especially in colleges and secondary schools, this paper presented an Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) microprocessor-based rice-selling machine for cafeterias. The machines consisted of a funnel-shaped rice bin, a thermal insulation box, and a conveying and scattering mechanism. Moreover, this machine exerts fuzzy control over stepper motor rpm, and the motor drives the conveyor belt with a scraper to scatter rice, deliver it, and keep it warm. Apart from an external 4*4 keyboard, a point of sale (POS) machine, an ARM process and a pressure sensor, the machine is also equipped with card swiping and weighting mechanisms to achieve functions of card swiping payment and precise measurement, respectively. In addition, detection of the right amount of rice and the alarm function are achieved using an ultrasonic sensor and a beeper, respectively. The presence of the rice container on the rice outlet is detected by an optoelectronic switch. Results show that this rice-selling machine achieves precise measurement, quick card swiping, fast rice selling, stable operation, and good rice heat preservation. Therefore, the mechanical design enables the machine to achieve its goals.

Total cholesterol monitoring in human blood serum is one of the most important routine analysis performed in clinical laboratory. Epidemiological studies have shown a strong correlation between coronary heart disease and blood cholesterol level. There is need for a method that is sufficiently flexible to yield good results in clinical laboratory. Numbers of cholesterol biosensors have been developed over the past 30 years. Fibre-optic fluorescence, Fibre-optic luminescence, Potentiometric, Spectrophotometric and Fluorometric biosensors, which determine cholesterol enzymatically. Some of these methods suffer from interference from other substances found in the blood such as ascorbic acid and uric acid. Therefore amperometric biosensor was designed based on titanium oxide nano particle with Advanced RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) Machine processor to determine the cholesterol level in human blood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents the design of a capacitive-sensor signal processing system, which is capable of converting the capacitance change into digital signal output with high accuracy and short conversion time. The system consists the current conveyors, analog switches, current source, A/D converter and 32-bit advanced RISC machine (ARM). The digital readout ranges from 0000 to FFFF corresponding to the capacitance change ranging from 0 to 2pF. Due to the functions of proposed system, the gain of digital readout versus sensor-capacitance change can be calibrated automatically. The effects of offset voltage and parasitic capacitance can be eliminated. Therefore, the relation of digital readout versus sensor-capacitance change exhibits high accuracy. The conversion time and maximum nonlinearity are less than 100μs and 24ppm, respectively. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]