Off-the-shelf inverted pendulum: Full implementation

Inertial positioning systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, from simple video games to high end consumer goods. This project capitalizes on the commoditization of these sophisticated electronics to offer a new approach to the inverted pendulum. Using readily available consumer grade equipment, the project implements several highly sophisticated features to ease the testing of theoretical control system techniques. The sensor data input handling has a sample rate of more than 2kHz, operating on an 8-core micro-controller. The system also transmits telemetry data wirelessly using a custom built networking protocol to monitoring and command software running on Mac OS X. All software in this project has been released as open source. Ultimately, this project will provide an ideal low-cost test bed for the development and testing of nonlinear control systems in mechatronics.