Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Getting Started
- Build and Wiring
- Programming with Vivado Design Suite
- Adding the PIR Motion Sensor
- Experimenting with Automatic Sliding Door
- Summary
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In this project I am going to develop a mini elevator prototype with the Arty S7 board. When I think about this project, I am thinking of people with disabilities because an elevator should not only be useful in an smart building, but also in houses with 2, 3 or 4 floors. In addition, a prototype helps us to carry out several experiments and quickly correct the possible errors that we find, avoiding serious problems in the future and seeing if we are on the right way or not. This will be 3-story mini elevator, and It will be 1 feet tall approx. Here’s how it will works!
Approach
The hardest part of figuring this out will the motor and floor detection technique. A real elevator probably uses a huge A/C motor with sensors at each floor location. We certainly could use this approach with a smaller-scale but putting sensors at each floor is a lot of wiring, and we would have concerns about sensitivity and alignment, etc. On the other hand, a stepper motor can be positioned precisel, but we would have to know exactly where we are and how far we have to go to do that.
Fortunately, I know how to use stepper motors and more interestingly, to save their positions in non-volatile memory (EEPROM). So we’ll use the same approach here. This way I will need a PIR Motion Sensor just to enable the elevator movement in the desired position.
The other design concern will be with the elevator call buttons. They need to be lit momentary contact switches, but the lights need to be controllable independently from the button. I will find any suitable solution using the push buttons and LEDS of the Arty S7 board to move up and down the elevator.
My idea is that when the user is inside the elevator cabin, he/she uses a switch to go up or down and when the one passes the hand over the PIR motion sensor the movement starts. When user reaches the destination the elevator will stop automatically. Also, the PIR motion sensor must be placed in a strategic place, for example inside a box or a cylinder, and where only the user can activate it with the hand.
Finally, I will experiment with an automatic sliding door that I will add to the Arty S7 mini elevator. I will explore several solutions to control this sliding door, including adding the CMOD S7 25 board that the sponsor gave me in another challenge.
Hardware
- ARTY S7 50 board,
- CMOD S7 25 board,
- Stepper motor 5V,
- DC motor 5V,
- L298N driver,
- L293B driver,
- PIR Motion Sensor,
- Battery 5V (2), and
- Wire.
Software
- VIVADO HLx Editions 2019.1
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