Power Electronics Laboratory Education using ARM Cortex M4 32-bit Microcontroller

Power electronics (PE) has become the most important subject in electrical engineering due to its wide applications and job opportunities. PE subject require a large number of experimental setups for better illustration of the students. PE lab development requires huge financial expenditure and knowledge on semiconductor devices, wiring, driver circuits, magnetics, controllers, etc. The aforementioned constraints can be eliminated by using low cost customizable driver cards, power circuits and controllers. This paper presents a cost effective and customizable hardware development for PE education. ARM Cortex M4 32-bit microcontroller (MC) along with Waijung blockset in MATLAB is used to ease the requirement of complex control coding. Moreover, the same hardware set up can be used to develop many different experiments such as dc-dc converter, inverter, etc. Detailed guidelines for setting up such experiments and the required controller design are explained in this paper. The hardware results are also presented.