Online Education of Microcontroller Control of Electric Drives with FPGA Based HIL

The pandemic situation related to Covid-19 exposed the need for alternative directions in education and its adaptation to online environment. This is especially the case in practically oriented courses, such as microprocessor control of electric drives. Those are typically strongly linked with the laboratory environment and requires special equipment such as electric motors, power converters, power sources, measurement equipment, embedded microcontrollers etc. The paper presents the tools for distant education of laboratory classes of Microprocessor control of electric drives course by using remote access to personal computers located in a laboratory. The core of the presented tool is a real time model of electric drive implemented in FPGA as a real-time Hardware In the Loop (HIL) simulator. The experimental comparison to the real drive is provided to verify the proposed tool.