Raspberry Pi and Arduino – a perfect couple for control education

Nowadays the control education usually heavily relies on the available simulation packages and virtual laboratories, both of which have their irreplaceable position in the educational process. But unfortunately the closed loop experiments are way too often limited to these virtual domains and the students lack the physical feedback about the impact of control algorithms and its parameters. The reasons might be the price of the hardware setup to demonstrate the control algorithms physically or a complicated transition from simulation to real-time platform. This paper describes an extremely inexpensive, straightforward and surprisingly powerful platform for implementation of real-time control algorithms. The platform consists of an Arduino board and a Raspberry Pi running the REX Control System. The Arduino board is used for interaction with the physical world via its inputs and outputs. The REX Control System allows the students to develop and verify the control algorithms in Simulink and then run it in real-time by a few mouse clicks. However, the REX Control System is by no means dependent on Simulink, it is fully functional even if Simulink license is not available. The platform further bridges the gap between the virtual and physical worlds as it is tightly connected to PIDlab.com and Contlab.eu portals, which makes it an ideal choice for control education purposes.