A Menu-based Universal Control Protocol

Abstract: This thesis-project aims to research the possibilities of new wireless technologies in general control-situations. We have studied different existing control protocols, and developed a new protocol focusing on textbased menus. Our protocol is scaleable, easy to implement, and platform- and media independent. Since our protocol supports Plug and Play with dynamically allocated id’s, it does not require a unique id in the hardware. To test the protocol we have developed a prototype system, consisting of a mobile phone connected to a server, which in turn is connected to two slave units, controlling peripheral equipment on 220 Volt. The phone is an Ericsson T28, equipped with a Bluetooth unit. The server is runningthe real-time OS eCos on an ARM 7TDMI Evaluation Kit, and the slave units consist of two developer boards equipped with PIC-processors. Communication between the phone and the server is done over Bluetooth. However we did not find a working Bluetooth protocol stack ported to eCos, so a serial cable was used instead. Communication between the server and the slaves is done over a RS-485 serial network which simulates the traffic over a radio-network. The results show that our protocol is working, and that our system would be easy to implement, cheap to produce and very scalable.