So, here's a block diagram, and I got this idea from an engineer at Aeroelectronics. We've had several lunches talking about this course specifically, learning outcomes that they would want to see in students that will graduate. One of the things that he does and his work at Aero, is he deploys these industrial Internet of Things system, and they work with Amazon Web Services and IBM and other, all these platform vendors that we took a look at, and they bring all of these components together. So, one of them was a baggage conveyor system at an airport. I got interested and we started talking more and more and more about it and I decided, you know, I'm going to model that. I'm going to model this baggage conveyor system in system C. Down here is what I call the main control system; you can think of it as the platform. This is IBM Watson Cloud Services or Amazon Web Services, okay? Maybe it's just a PC that's tied into a cloud services or maybe there is no cloud services at all, okay? Let's add some range of options as design engineers on what we want to do, but something has to be controlling this conveyor and starting and stopping it, and keeping track of where all the bags are. So, when bags get unloaded off the plains, they end up at the right care. So, we just expect this to just happen and everything. We expect the system to get it right, and I don't know if you've ever lost a bag at airports, happened to me, there, you go to customer service after everyone's left, and the carousel is still going around and your bag hasn't shown up. [inaudible] Oh, great, now I got to go to customer service, and they take your information. In a day or two later, you know, a United Van or an American Airlines van shows up at your house with your luggage because it woops, accidentally got routed into the wrong place. Here's his main control system and here's a conveyor. This box represents the actual physical conveyor belt or belts. When I get it fully working, I want to extend it and have multiple segments of conveyors and have some wires in it where the baggage can go to different, essentially, go be routed to different carousels and have a switching mechanism in there. But I thought, "Well, I'd better crawl before I can walk. So, let's just start with a conveyor that consists of one segment first and you can get all that code working.Then I can expand it from there. So, what makes a conveyor go? You got a DC motor here. DC motor can be turned on, make it go, turn off and stops, okay? So here's an embedded system that's out probably intimately integrated into the conveyor system. It's going to be physically close, okay? The motor makes it go, but how do we keep track of the position? So, use a rotary shaft encoder. Raise your hand if you've heard of a rotary shaft encoder. Okay. All right cool, got one. In this particular system, I asked the engineer from Aero. So, what kind of problems and challenges does this conveyor system have? They said these rotary shaft encoders, they wear out, they get hot, they vibrate, and so we need to monitor them. So, there's a vibration sensor. That's what these devices here mounted somehow, the mechanical mounting isn't shown, but the idea is a vibration center on the side of this rotary shaft encoder. They turn themselves when you have one of these. They are about this big, about that long, and the shaft spins really easy on them, so I'm not sure why they're having vibration issues. They're also having temperature issues, so, this is a three-pronged temperature thermocouple. These are all input, provide inputs into this embedded system. So, the embedded system controller says motor turn on or turn off. There's no speed, it's just when it's on it runs at one speed, and ones off it stops. Then these sensors here gives you position vibration and temperature, okay? This information is conveyed from this embedded system controller to the main control system back here. These could be wired communication links or wireless communication links, it doesn't matter. The level of abstraction that I used that you'll see in a minute. We don't care at this level of abstraction what this really is, okay? Then, there's the airport ground crew that have the heavy baggage scanners, they got a barcode scanners or some kind of a handheld device. I imagine in my cartoon example here I've got a couple, it's got a red and a green LED. Red means stop scanning because there's a problem down the line. One of the segments in the conveyor has stopped so we don't want to be putting more baggage onto the system. When the LED is green, the ground crew can scan each bag, put it under the conveyor system so that it gets routed to where it needs to go. There's a laser and a photo receiver that I didn't draw that's scanning all the bar-codes on the baggage tag, so it knows who it is and what carousel it's supposed to go to. This main control system communicates with the bar-code scanner as well and quite probably wirelessly. So, this is how I envisioned the physical system of my first go with modeling of physical systems as opposed to modeling a drive.
