A low budget take-home control engineering laboratory for undergraduate

Take-home engineering laboratories bring benefits for both students and the university such as flexible access times and reduced load on laboratories. Traditional control engineering laboratories are not suitable for take-home activities as they tend to be expensive or dangerous. This paper proposes a low budget take-home control laboratory based on a simple thermal system which also shows the effects of hardware limitations including saturation, quantisation and sampling jitter. A thermal hardware kit has been designed which is low-cost, safe and portable. A full laboratory guide and tutorial for the usage of the kit with MATLAB/Simulink has been written and is publicly available. The efficacy of the proposed take-home laboratory was evaluated by exam results and feedback of students who undertook a control course at RMIT University. The student evaluation and exam results were very positive and the laboratory will be extended next year.