Teaching Control Engineering Concepts using Open Source tools on a Raspberry Pi board

Abstract

This paper presents the idea about how to combine a set of software and hardware resources available in literature to be used as support to control engineering education. The available tools allow to mix topics related to programming, communications, operating systems, and control theory. The well-known Raspberry Pi board is used as platform to exploit the di_erent proposed concepts. SciPy, Matplotlib, and NumPy libraries, which are Python-based open-source libraries for scienti_c computing and graphical representation, are used to perform Matlab-like simulations and to implement classical control loops. On the other hand, virtual processes developed in Easy Java Simulations are adapted to be controlled through the network from a controller implemented on the Raspberry Pi with Python. This option is very useful from a teaching point of view since time-based, networked-based, or event-based control approaches can be easily introduced on this proposed architecture. Furthermore, once students know how to implement control loops on the Raspberry Pi using Python, external real processes can be easily controlled by using the GPIO interface available in the this electronic board. Then, a project based on these tools and ideas is motivated and presented in this paper to control a two-tank level process © Copyright IFAC 2015.