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Amazing Ball

A low-cost "Ball and Plate" plant to learn automatic control with ease

Amazing Ball

Amazing Ball is a complete, ready-to-use system for learning and teaching real-time automatic control.

Goal:

To design a robust control system which dynamically maintains the steel ball in a quasi-equilibrium position over an oscillating plate (2-DOF) with minimum position error. The ball can either remain at a fixed reference point or it can trace a pre-determined path.

Means:

Using a Ball & Plate system with servo motors and touchscreen; powered by opensource mathematical control tools and SCICOSLAB to evaluate and implement feedback strategies such as PID, LQC, H infinity, fuzzy, neural nets, adaptive or nonlinear controllers. The hardware comes with an installed demo program and it also has a dedicated power supply. Hence, the user can immediately run the system by connecting the power plug and at the same time check the system characteristics by connecting the hardware to the PC via an Ethernet cable.

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Key features:

Opensource

Control system design is powered by opensource mathematical control tools- SCILAB, SCICOS, and SCICOSLAB, so the user can design the control algorithm in a block diagram inside SCICOS and then using the code generator to generate the C-code and the executable file. The FLEX Boards which controls the hardware uses Erika Enterprise, a free of charge open-source implementation of the ISO 17356 API (derived from the OSEK/VDX API).

Quick programming

The user can design a complete control system without writing a line of code because the platform is entirely supported by the Scicos code generator. Matlab/Simulink support for code generation is currently under development.

Robust design

It consists of an oscillating steel plate pivoted on a central joint and held in a balanced position by a set of four springs (patent pending). The 2-DOF are ensured by two servomotors, each connected to the plate by a pair of steel links. The inner sides of the plate have rubber padding to absorb any impact resulting from violent movements of the steel ball.

Touchscreen feedback

A high resolution touchscreen is mounted on the plate to measure the coordinates of the ball in real-time.

dsPIC^® microcontroller

User control algorithms are run on a powerful Microchip dsPIC^®33F microcontroller hosted on FLEX boards. The device has specific hardware modules to acquire ball position coordinates and to generate PWM control output signals. The dsPIC^®33F microcontroller can also communicate with other external devices.

Real-time execution

Real-time execution of the embedded code is ensured by the ERIKA Enterprise kernel, an innovative RTOS for small microcontrollers based on an API similar to those proposed by the OSEK/VDX Consortium.

PC connectivity

Data can be transferred to PC via Ethernet or RS-232 connection. Other serial communication like RS-485 and CAN can be used to increase the complexity of the system (e.g. central controller in a control systems network).