When I first saw the Intel Industrial Control in Concert demonstration at Design West 2012 in San Jose, CA, I immediately thought of Kurt Vonnegut ‘s 1952 novel Player Piano. The connection, of course, is that the player piano in the novel and Intel’s Atom-based robotic orchestra both play preprogrammed music without human involvement. But the similarities end there. Vonnegut used the self-playing autopiano as a metaphor for a mechanized society in which wealthy industrialists replaced human workers with automated machines. In contrast, Intel’s innovative system demonstrated engineering excellence and created a buzz in the in the already positive atmosphere at the conference.
In “EtherCAT Orchestra” (Circuit Cellar 264, July 2012), Richard Wotiz carefully details the awe-inspiring music machine that’s built around seven embedded systems, each of which is based on Intel’s Atom D525 dual-core microprocessor. He provides information about the system you can’t find on YouTube or hobby tech blogs. Here is the article in its entirety.
REFERENCES
[1] National Instruments Corp., “Benchmarks for the NI 9144 EtherCAT Slave Chassis,” http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/10596.
RESOURCES
Animusic, LLC, www.animusic.com.Beckhoff Automation GmbH, “ET1100 EtherCAT Slave Controller Hardware Data Sheet, Version 1.8”, 2010, www.beckhoff.com/english/download/ethercat_development_products.htm.
EtherCAT Technology Group, “The Ethernet Fieldbus”, 2009, www.ethercat.org/pdf/english/ETG_Brochure_EN.pdf.
Intel, Atom microprocessor, www.intel.com/content/ www/us/en/processors/atom/atom-processor.html.
SOURCES
Atom D525 dual-core microprocessor
Intel Corp.
www.intel.comLabVIEW Real-Time modules, CompactRIO controller, and EtherCAT devices
National Instruments Corp.
www.ni.com
Circuit Cellar 264 is now on newsstands and available at CC-Webshop.com.
