Ball and Beam

This topic area will work with the ball and beam system in the laboratory. There is a QNX driver for the data acquisition card that drives the ball and beam. You will need to learn this driver, and the interface to the ball and beam system for reading the sensors and driving the output. The manufacturer has a One task will be to characterize the sensors and actuators. You will design, implement, and document a framework that future students will use to have easy access to the ball and beam system. You will demonstrate the framework by implementing a controller for the ball and beam. This controller can be as simple or complex as your time permits. You can use any references for ball and beam controller designs that are available. The manufacturers have a suggested experiment which contains some reference information about the system. Because of resource limits, I will only assign one team to work in this topic area.

Deliverables

• A report in a Word file containing
  • Design of the your framework for working with the ball and beam system under QNX.
  • Description of how to use your framework
  • Instructions for creating a QNX project that uses your framework to work with the ball and beam.
  • Characterization of the beam position sensor, both master and slave. (Include measured data used for the calculation in a separate spreadsheet.)
  • Characterization of the motor angle sensor. (Include measured data used for the calculation in a separate spreadsheet.)
  • Equations describing the beam geometry. (Hand written document scanned into your Word file is acceptable.)
  • A text description of the controllers that you defined, and the mathematical transforms for the controllers.
  • References you used for information on controlling the ball and beam.
  • Experimental results characterizing the performance of your controllers. Compute overshoot, settling time, rise time. Plots of the input reference signal and the ball position response.
  • Conclusions about the controllers.
  • Unresolved issues, and problems. Gotchas to watch out for.
  • Other things that you think students next year will need to know
• Source code for your ball and beam framework
• Source code for your ball and beam controllers
• QNX project directories for the controllers that you implemented.
• An initial QNX project directory configured for the ball and beam, containing files that are required, and ready for application code to be added.

$Id: BallAndBeam.html 68 2010-03-29 03:06:15Z jrv $