The design and development of PDA for electricians

This paper investigates the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) whose functions include multimeter, Oscilloscope, generic electrical formula calculation and electrical parameter manual. This PDA's hardware consists of a microprocessor S3C2440 based on ARM core, the circuit for data collection and process and the display circuit of touch-screen/LCD. In addition, an embedded Linux operating system (OS) is transplanted and the design of graphical user interface using MiniGUI is implemented in this PDA. The PDA presented in this paper can measure resistance, capacitance, inductance, voltage, current, frequency and other basic electrical parameters. The real-time comprehensive measure of the instantaneous value of online AC voltage & current, power factor, active power, reactive power, apparent power, frequency and other electrical parameters can also be achieved. The PDA's additional functions include displaying the real-time electrical signals and parameters in the form of digital and waveform form, formula calculation, network communications, online query as well as automatic storage. The wide applications of the PDA implemented in this paper will enable the electrical technicians to work without multiple instruments, numerous information queries and formula calculations, which greatly improves the work efficiency.