Low‐Cost Acquisition and Control System Architecture for Engineering Lab Courses

ABSTRACT This article presents a low‐cost data acquisition architecture for control engineering education, enabling integration with new pedagogical systems or leveraging legacy professional setups. The proposed system uses Arduino boards together with a custom shield with digital to analog converter (DAC), encoder interface, and analog modulation, and integrates with MATLAB Simulink for real‐time control. A prototype was implemented and tested on a rotary flexible link and a Furuta pendulum, demonstrating its reliability and performance. The same prototype is compatible with other platforms and programming languages, such as Python and C, and can operate across different operating systems. The control of cyber‐physical systems serves as a case study under which the experimental results are presented.