Power Electronics Development Center
Regarding passing values between two targets
An updated version of the GPIC Reference Design application with support for the new AgileStack Power Converter Evaluation Kit is available below. To increase the reliability and reduce operating costs, the new AgileStack power converters are truly digital power converters that provide extensive built-in monitoring and diagnostic capability along with highly configurable fault detection, management, and recording. This combines with the extensive digital signal processing and advanced control capabilities of the NI General Purpose Inverter Controller, which provides a heterogeneous FPGA control platform with 58 embedded DSP cores and high level graphical programing tools with fully integrated model based design and power converter global optimization tools, including real-time power electronics simulation capabilities.
This example code includes the 5 Mbps serial UART interface to the AgileStack with FPGA based decoding of the serial packets containing the 3 phase currents, 3 half-bridge temperatures, and the DC link voltage. The GPIC analog inputs provide 3-phase grid and phase voltage sensing. The code includes the complete FPGA, RT, and Windows desktop user interface applications for the DC2AC converter, although automatic fault capture/logging is not currently implemented.
To extract, you must use 7-Zip or Winzip (not Windows built in ZIP archive utility) and you must unzip to a very short path such as "C:\PowerDev\" (not to your desktop):
ftp://ftp.ni.com/evaluation/powerdev/training/GPICReferenceDesign2014AgileStack.zip
A screenshot of the GPIC Serial UART Interface and Pack Decoder Logic is shown below, from "[FPGA] GPIC AgileSwitch 3-Phase DC-to-AC Inverter Control.vi".
See also the simple control and serial interface example under the FPGA UART folder, named "[FPGA] GPIC AgileStack Control.vi".
Notes:
- In all of the examples, FPGA-based fault capture will be moved to the real-time processor application (using the DMA data stream) to free up a significant amount of FPGA resources. In the AgileStack DC2AC converter application, the real-time processor based fault capture feature has not yet been implemented. (In the SKiiP3/Methode SmartPowerStack examples, the FPGA-based fault capture implementation remains unchanged.)
- An AgileStack example for DC2DC converter has not yet been implemented.
- You will need to first update the AgileStack firmware and then reboot it (unpower, repower) per instructions from AgileSwitch. This is located on the website at: www.agileswitch.com/download.page
