Evaluation of Inexpensive Hardware for Control Theory Application

With the increasing class size, it is necessary to increase the laboratory size associated with that class.However, that creates problems like cost and space issues.If smaller and cheaper laboratory hardware is used these problems might be minimized by having hardware that students can purchase and use at home.However, inexpensive hardware may lead to poor matches between theoretical models and experimental data, which can confuse students at the introductory level.Care must be taken while using this kind of hardware.In this paper performance analysis of such an inexpensive set of hardware is discussed for introductory control theory class.The hardware is smaller in size and shows satisfactory experimental performance, which suggests that this can be a good fit for introductory control theory laboratory.