Development System for Wireless Control Applied to Renewable Power Plants

Traditionally, microcontroller units (MCU) used in control applications used to send data via serial ports or a proprietary communication system to a computer for monitoring purposes as well as to get control commands. However, this procedure presents some drawbacks since the MCU itself performs the communication tasks, using up part of the limited cycle time available for control. In this paper, a novel development system using the new dual core MCU trend is proposed and used to carry out the emulation of a whole renewable power plant. It takes advantage of two different and specialized microcontroller architectures, wherein a communication core monitors what the other core, a control DSP, is measuring, calculating, etc., and sends a large amount of data to a computer without disturbing the control cycle time. Also, since the MCU features a native Ethernet connection, the emulated power plant can even be controlled and monitored from afar.