20-sim is a software package designed to model and simulate mechatronic systems.
It can generate code based on the models and run this on a specific target with real-time measurements with an extension called 20-sim 4C. This allows for rapid prototyping of control software.The Raspberry Pi 3 is a single board computer designed for educational purposes and its low price and flexibility make it an interesting product for the academic world.
This assignment focuses on making the Raspberry Pi 3 available as a target for 20-sim 4C. This means it should work with this software like any other target would.
Furthermore, the possibilities of the Raspberry Pi 3 as a hard real-time system will be explored. Because the Raspberry Pi is designed as a general computer, it has other specifications than more dedicated hard-time computer boards. This means that the execution of real-time tasks may not go as good as is necessary for hard real-time applications. The jitter of the executed tasks, the interrupt latencies and the idle time of the processor will be measured to see if the performance is up to par.
Doing these measurements while changing the I/O usage and the amount of calculations in the software will indicate the limits of the Raspberry Pi. Finally, a demo will be made to show that the Raspberry Pi works properly as a target for 20-sim and 20-sim 4C.