The Temperature Box: an introductory control systems project

There is a heightened awareness in the academic controls community about the need to attract the best and brightest students to the discipline. To achieve this end, change is needed in the standard approaches to educating, recruiting, and training students. In the paper, the “Temperature Box” experiment is presented. This experiment involves the design and implementation of a feedback temperature control system. At the United States Naval Academy, the Temperature Box is used to motivate the material in an introductory system engineering course at the sophomore level. This experiment would also be suitable for use in a freshman engineering course, a control systems laboratory course, or an electronics course as a controls application of analog and digital electronics