Low-cost Hardware

The technical details of my laboratory kit for control systems were published in the Raspberry Pi special edition of Electronics.  This article also includes the newly added Furuta Inverted Pendulum attachment for the kit.  The open access paper can be found on the Electronics website.

I created a video demonstration of my control systems laboratory kit to help expand the reach of the new possibilities of instructional laboratories with low-cost hardware.

On April 1, 2016, I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation in submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Systems and Entrepreneurial Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  My dissertation consisted of three different studies related to experiential learning.

We are seeking volunteers who have experience teaching and/or developing control systems laboratories. The purpose of this study is to determine a consensus of the most important learning outcomes, concepts, and equipment for students to experience in a control systems laboratory. In order to achieve a consensus the survey will be administered in four rounds between June and August 2015. Each round will take approximately 20-30 minutes to complete.

In order for the Raspberry Pi to read the motor's position from the potentiometer, the analog signal needs to be converted to a digital signal.  I selected an MCP3002 analog-to-digital converter (ADC) for this purpose.  The digital output from the MCP3002 can be read using the SPI or I2C protocols and the Raspberry Pi has built in drivers in the WiringPi libraries for both protocols.  I used SPI in the GE320 kit because the driver already existed in WiringPi, which made the implementation very easy.