This paper describes a recent and very
advantageous upgrade of the undergraduate controls
laboratory in the Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering
Department at Kansas State University. The current lab has
been in use for about a decade. Details regarding the original
hardware fundamental to the laboratory activities, including
the embedded digital signal processor (DSP) and the brushless
DC motor stand (called the “Motorlab”), are presented and a
summary of each of the fourteen weekly lab exercises is
included. The DSP control program and PC user interface (UI)
were each written in C. In order to accommodate future lab
needs and to ease the maintenance burden, the embedded DSP
was replaced by a PC running Real-Time LabVIEW from
National Instruments (NI) and a NI data acquisition card. The
original lab software was replaced with programs produced
graphically in LabVIEW, known as Virtual Instruments (VIs).
The VIs implement the controller on the real-time PC as well
as the user interface on a host PC. Both the embedded DSP
and the LabVIEW controllers are able to close the loop on the
laboratory equipment with a 10 kHz, hard real-time, sample
rate.
