When elevators first turned accessible, they have been managed manually. They required operators, identical to trains and different automobiles, to manage course and velocity. However, after all, it wasn’t too lengthy earlier than everybody realized that handbook operation wasn’t vital, as elevator motion could be very constrained and predictable. Even so, elevator management techniques are fascinating as a result of they fulfill particular logistical necessities with most effectivity. If that type of factor piques your curiosity, you’ll wish to take a look at BorisDigital’s simulated elevator management system.
Except you occur to personal a constructing with a number of flooring, you in all probability don’t have an actual elevator that you may go tinkering with. In case you’re one of many few individuals in our viewers that does have an elevator, we nonetheless advise in opposition to that type of factor. A simulated expertise by mockups is a extra sensible various. However that doesn’t need to be boring and you’ll nonetheless get all the enjoyable of bodily buttons, life like operation, and real drawback fixing.
Boris achieved that with a system design consisting of two panel varieties: one for the elevator automobile and one for every ground. The system can deal with a number of panels of the latter sort. There’s additionally a separate controller for steering a type of hydraulic system that strikes a miniature elevator automobile, which is an attention-grabbing addition if you wish to see one thing shifting.
The elevator automobile panel incorporates a Raspberry Pi 4 Mannequin B single-board pc and it’s the central “mind” of the entire system. That panel has a button for every ground, door shut and door open buttons, an alarm button, and full-color LCD display screen. That display screen can show the present ground, in addition to constructing info and even ads such as you may see in an actual tower. Boris additionally included an upkeep menu accessible by that panel interface.
The elevator name button panels for every ground include Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W boards. These are microcontroller growth boards and never single-board computer systems just like the Raspberry Pi within the elevator automobile panel. A Pico 2 W additionally controls the relays for the hydraulic system.
Every Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W board communicates with the elevator automobile’s Raspberry Pi 4 Mannequin B by MQTT messages despatched over WiFi, to allow them to go wherever inside vary of the native WiFi community. In the true world, the {hardware} can be hardwired, however that is adequate for the simulated expertise.
This gave Boris the power to experiment with elevator management ideas, together with the algorithms that elevators use to resolve the place to go when there are a number of simultaneous requests on totally different flooring.
