Ball on plate balancing system for multi-discipline educational purposes

The paper presents a ball on plate balancing system useful for various educational purposes. A touch-screen placed on the plate is used for ball´s position sensing and two servomotors are employed for balancing the plate in order to control ball´s Cartesian coordinates. The design of control embedded systems is demonstrated for different control algorithms in compliance with FreeRTOS real time operating system and dsPIC33 microcontroller. On-line visualizations useful for system monitoring are provided by a PC host application connected with the embedded application. The measurements acquired during real-time execution and the parameters of the system are stored in specific data files, as support for any desired additional analysis. Taking into account the properties of this controlled system (instability, fast dynamics) and the capabilities of the embedded architecture (diversity of the involved communication protocols, diversity of employed hardware components, usage of an open source real time operating system), this educational setup allows a good illustration of numerous theoretical and practical aspects related to system engineering and applied informatics.