Open-source hardware in controls education

In teaching undergraduate automatic controls, the laboratory experience is an important and irreplaceable component. Historically, good platforms for a controls laboratory have been expensive, because the equipment has typically been very specialized for educational purposes. Moreover, the equipment often is not physically robust in the face of student manhandling, creating major difficulties and costs in maintaining such a lab. The advent of inexpensive open-source controller hardware is revolutionizing this situation because it is now possible to have good controls-hardware capability at relatively low cost. The Arduino Mega 2560, in particular, is supported by Matlab, Simulink and LabView, and thus provides a great deal of flexibility in developing laboratory procedures for students to study controls. The Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. The "motor shield" is an add-on (daughterboard) to the Arduino that further enables control of dc motors. This paper explains a method and hardware to connect an Arduino to a separately-powered dc-motor unit. Matlab and Simulink provide full support of the Arduino board for feedback-controller design. The Arduino board is powered by, and communicates with Simulink, through a standard USB connection.