BYOE: Affordable and Portable Laboratory Kit for Controls Courses

A portable and affordable laboratory kit for an undergraduate control systems course will be demonstrated. The kit includes a Raspberry Pi (a single board computer), DC motor, and other circuits and sensors. The kit’s custom components were 3D printed. All other components of the kit can be purchased from online retailers such as Adafruit or Sparkfun for a total cost of about $130. This kit could replace expensive equipment with an affordable alternative that can be easily shipped anywhere in the world and used by students with any computer. The low cost and portability of the kit greatly enhance the accessibility of the laboratory experience to students in budget-strapped campus laboratories and those participating in distance education.

Using a DC motor allows the instructor to assign experiments using a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) to control the motor’s position. Additionally, a DC motor setup can be expanded to create more complex setups like the inverted pendulum. Inverted pendulum experiments can illustrate different types of systems and different types of control methods. These methods include bang-bang control, fuzzy logic control, neural network control, PID adaptive control, robust control, hybrid control, predictive control, and feed-forward control. Because of this

versatility, both the DC Motor and inverted pendulum systems will be used as the basis for the kit being developed.