Low Cost Setup to Support PID Ideas in Control Engineering Education

A laboratory equipment that has been employed in experimental activities to code real-time PID control algorithms is described in this paper. This digital apparatus, including a MTG plant (motor+tachometer) and a simple data acquisition board, is flexible to assess not only PID controller loop methodologies but also tuning and design aspects. Among the different possibilities of using a PID control algorithm, the students can realize and be in touch with their own control code implementation. These essays raise, a bit more, the motivation for PID control lessons. In particular, the whole real-time equipment operates in the industrial pattern of voltage, is cheap and is easy to install as standard control equipment in any control laboratory. The main advantage is the very low cost if compared to similar laboratory scale educational setup. Three control tasks for the students in a discipline called Feedback Systems are taken as examples and evaluation results from the students are shown.