Design of a fuzzy system to control a small electric train using the microchip PIC32 with the aid of MATLAB blocksets

This paper describes the design of a small train controller based on the microchip PIC32 32 bit 32MX360F512L microcontroller, mounted on PIC32 starter kit, to control a small electric train using the MATLAB fuzzy logic tool together with MPLAB- MATLAB blocksets developed by Kerhuel (1). Though the controller has got 16 analogue to digital converter channels, it has no digital to analogue converters (DAC). This has led to the use of an external SPI serial MCP 4921 single channel DAC developed by microchip as well. The only currently available SIMULINK blocksets are developed for 16 or 32 bit PIC controllers. 16 bit PICs (DSPIC30xxx and DSPIC33xxx) were not used in this project because when implementing MATLAB fuzzy logic algorithm with a high number of rules (more than five rules), this requires larger stack memory which was not available on both chips. This lead us to use The PIC32 controller, because of its relatively big stack memory.