Lightweight Hardware in the Loop Setup for Research and Rapid Prototyping

This paper presents a cost effective Hardware in the Loop environment for educational purposes, used for development of control strategies for simulated systems, but using a real controller, to be as close to the reality as possible. The environment has a custom hardware interface device, which creates connection between the physical signals of the real controller and the digital signals of a personal computer (PC). All these digital signals are processed in the real-time simulation, running on a normal Windows machine, under the Simulink Desktop Real-Time software environment. The paper presents the development steps of hardware interface device, as well as the Simulink environment, which connects to and controls the hardware components. The created environment was validated with multiple applications, to ensure its proper functioning.