The Idea of BIOE
Necessity is the mother of invention and so the BIOE system was developed at my diploma thesis with the view to develop a simple and low-cost hardware for control and automation tasks. The challenge was to close the gap between a common PC equipped with a real-time operating system (e.g. Linux with RTAI) and the plant with a piece of hardware, which can be build by a student within 2 hours using standard components.
The result of this work is a mikrocontroller based module, which is connected to the PC's parallel port, a software for the purpose of testing the communication and a framework to use this system with common CACSD systems like Scilab/Scicos and the real-time operating system RTAI-Linux. Each element contains a choice of configurations, which can be activated with the corresponding DTN (Device-Type-Number). So the connection to sensor signals and the control of actuators will be done by the firmware of the BIOE. Only the final value of the sensor or actuator is transmitted using the PC's parallel port interface.