A Light-Weight Rapid Control Prototyping System Based on Open Source Hardware

In this paper, we propose a light-weight rapid control prototyping (RCP) system based on off-the-shelf open source hardware to achieve high performance computing, cost effectiveness, portability, and easy accessiblity. The proposed RCP system consists of a PC-based computer-aided control system design (CACSD) tool for computing control action and tiny palm-sized open source hardware for input and output (I/O) operation and data transfer through a built-in high-speed USB interface. The popular-priced and portable open source hardware is used as a bridge between CACSD tools and real plants to deliver the control and sensor data at the sampling time points. Ten I/O function blocks written in C code are developed based on the CACSD tool employed for the proposed light-weight RCP system in order to handle I/O operation in a simple way. In addition, we suggest two practical strategies, a batch transfer strategy and a variable sampling period method, to increase the sampling rate of the control system. It is shown through experiment that the proposed light-weight RCP system works well up to a sampling rate of 2 kHz without adopting expensive hardware and C code generators. It is expected that the proposed RCP system will be considered as affordable and readily available to schools for mass education.