ELEC/TELE/PHTN 4123

Electrical/Telecommunications Design Proficiency

Session 2, 2012

Lab 3: Control System Design

Dr Elias Aboutanios
Dr Tharmarajah Thiruvaran

Aim
The aim of this lab is to examine your ability to apply concepts from control theory to the design of a controller
of to achieve a desired plant response to a specified input. In carrying out your design task, you need to follow the
steps of the design process outlined in the preliminary work section. Additionally, for this particular lab, the notes
of ELEC2042, ELEC3106, and ELEC3114 (which can all be found under subjects.ee.unsw.edu.au) might be useful,
while advanced subjects that might be helpful are ELEC4631 and ELEC4632.
A list of components that are available for purchase from the Electronics Workshop can be accessed online at
http://www.ee.unsw.edu.au/lab parts.php. In your designs, you may only use components from this list. Con-
cepts that are relevant to this lab include:

• Plant Modelling: ability to model a system, both theoretically or empirically.

• Laplace and z transforms.
• Characteristics of the system response: rise and settling times, overshoot, steady state error.

• Proportional, integral and derivative control.

• Stability.

Lab Organisation and Marking Scheme

The laboratory design task aims to test you on a number components that define your ability to behave as a professional
engineer in the context of control system design:

1. Firstly, having acquired the relevant theory from the courses you have undertaken as part of the degree, you are
required to demonstrate a basic proficiency in signal processing.
2. You must be able to identify and acquire new knowledge that you are lacking and that is essential to the successful
completion of the project. There will rarely be a situation where you will already have all the knowledge you
need to solve a problem. Thus it is important that you can research what you do not know.
3. You need to be able to work in a logical and systematic fashion. Solving a design problem is not about finding
a kit or some instructions on the web or in a textbook and following them blindly. Rather it involves making
choices subject to the requirements and constraints you have. Therefore, you must identifying the pre-requisite
knowledge that would allow you make these choices, and exercise this knowledge in a structured way to achieve
your aim.
4. You must be capable of working individually. You should be self-reliant.

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5. You must also be able to work as part of a team, to present your ideas, discuss them, defend them, and provide
constructive criticism to others. Your understanding of your task and your ability to communicate clearly are
essential in this regard.
6. Finally, you must be capable of applying sound design practice towards solving the design problem you are given.

The laboratory will run over two sessions: a preliminary lab, and an implementation lab session. The first session
will contribute 30% to the total lab mark, while the second will account for 60%. The remaining 10% is allocated to
a self-reflection exercise that you will complete after the implementation lab.

Preliminary Design Session

During this session, you are required to achieve an adequate understanding of the requirements as well as complete a
preliminary design. The preliminary lab session is organised as follows:

• 10 minutes preparation where you take the time to read the design task and think about the requirements. You
are to do this in your pairing.
• 20 minutes discussion on the requirements (essentially the requirements analysis phase) done as a group. This
discussion should only deal with the requirements analysis and should not touch on the concept generation stage.
• 2 hours of strictly individual work to develop a preliminary design. This covers the concept generation step
moving as far down the design process, through the high level design, specifications, and low level design, as you
are able to go in the time. But you should at least have the concept generation and the high level design.
• 8 minutes presentation each. No questions or discussions are allowed here. At the start of this activity, and
before any of the presentations, every pair will put their flipchart page on the wall.
• Remaining time to discuss and debate the designs.

It is important to see the purpose behind this process. It consists of a combination of individual work (with your
partner) and inter-group interactions. The individual work allows you to use your knowledge to arrive at your own
design. This is extremely important firstly to enable you to assess your prior knowledge and identify your weaknesses,
and secondly to the success of the group session. The larger the variety of designs that are presented is, the more likely
the quality of the final design will be improved. Therefore, it is important to contribute and be able to constructively
criticise the designs of others and to explain and defend your own (note that it is just as important that you see a valid
point someone else might make regarding your approach). This should be done, however, in the spirit of cooperation
and not competition. Imagine that you are a team in a company and are working together to produce this design.
Your mark for this session will reflect the quality of the contribution you make.
The marking scheme for this session consists of the following (where 100% is the total mark for the preliminary
session):

• Contribution to the requirements analysis.

• Detailed design presentation.
• Contribution to the final discussion.

Following the preliminary lab session, you have one week to complete your design, refine it, improve it, tweak it,
or change it as you see fit. You do not have to restrict yourselves to the results of the first lab session. During this
time you must also produce your design report. The report should include your final detailed design as well as your
implementation and test plan. The report is to be handed in to the lab demonstrator at the end of the implementation
session. The importance of your implementation and test plans cannot be over-emphasised.

Implementation Session
The preliminary report will be checked by your lab demonstrator at the start of the session. As mentioned above,
this report will have to be submitted at the end of your lab session when you are being assessed. However, during the
implementation stage you will keep it with you in order to use the implementation and test plans.
The lab session itself will be dedicated to the implementation of the design and the assessment. You will have around
2 hours to implement your design before being assessed. Your breadboard must be completely unpopulated

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at the start of the session. Given the amount of time you have, it is imperative that you come to the lab session
very well organised and armed with a good implementation plan. The marking will start strictly at 4:00 pm, when
you must all stop work and must move away from your desks. The marking time of 2 hours allows strictly 15 minutes
per student per lab group. A roster will be announced by the lab demonstrator. Be prepared for your marking turn
and try to be efficient in demonstrating and explaining your design. It is difficult to overstress the importance of the
implementation and test plans. You must prepare them carefully and make sure they are useful to you in the lab.
Both of them will play a significant role in your assessment. The implementation plan should give you the instructions
to navigate your way from the start of the lab to a working system. The test plan should give you a clear way of
testing and verifying that your system works (i.e. it does what it was designed to do, in the way it was designed to
do it.) This is important both for debugging your system in case something does not work, and for demonstrating it
to your lab assessor.
The marking scheme for this session is as follows:

• Neatness of the breadboard/code.

• Qualities of your design such as simplicity, elegance, efficiency of the solution...
• Demonstrating your design - Does your design achieve the basic requirements?

• Demonstrating your understanding, can you explain the operation of your system?

The Self-Reflection Exercise

An important goal of the subject is to give you the opportunity to identify your strengths and weaknesses and so
improve yourselves. You will have to reflect on the experience you had, the challenges you faced, the quality of the work
you managed to achieve and submit a self-reflection sheet individually. As part of this exercise you need to identify
what you got out of the experience and where you could improve. Therefore, the reflection sheet should include three
sections: the first should deal with what your strengths are, the second section should cover what your weaknesses
are, and the third is about how you can improve (bolster your strengths and fix your weaknesses). Note that the sheet
should clearly identify who you are, name and student ID. For this lab, you will upload your self-reflection sheet on
Moodle.

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The Design Task

You will be given a dc motor coupled with a generator and the motor driver circuit where you can drive the motor
through the driver circuit. You are required to display the speed of the motor and the output voltage of the generator
on the screen.

1. You are required to build a computer controlled system to produce any desired time-varying piecewise constant
voltage across a resistive load. The desired voltage level can take any value between 2V and 5V.
2. When the load is changed from one load to another (e.g. 10 to 20 or 1M and vice versa) you are required to
maintain a constant voltage.

You are required to have zero steady state error in the generator voltage while minimizing the rise time, overshoot,
settling time and measure those parameters for the above two cases (you need to display the curves used for the
calculation). Identify and display the relevant quantities (including graphically) in MATLAB to demonstrate the
operation of your controller and how successful your controller is. The control system must be implemented in Matlab
and NI-DAQ must be used to interface your system with the PC.

The preliminary work

The preliminary work is extremely important and should be prepared properly. It will form a guide for you in
the implementation lab and without neat and well organised preliminary preparations you will struggle to finish the
implementation part. Each student is to submit a typed copy of the preliminary work. This is to include the following:

1. Problem statement
2. Design Requirements: Here you must clearly state your hard requirements and soft requirements.

3. A detailed design that should develop the system down to the fine details.
4. An implementation and test plan.

Remember that the report is primarily intended for you to make your implementation lab manageable. As such,
clarity and conciseness are essential. It should essentially provide you with a set of easy to follow instructions for
successfully implementing your system.

Good Coding practice and Breadboard Layout

It is very important that your breadboard be neatly and logically laid out and marks are allocated for this. Try to
follow the circuit diagram as closely as possible as this makes it easier for you to follow the circuit when putting the
components into the breadboard and when things do go wrong. Trim the components’ legs and push them as close
to the breadboard as possible. Do the same with jumper wires. This makes for a neat layout and minimises the risk
of the legs or wires touching and shorting. Also having wires sticking out above the board makes it difficult to trace
your circuit. When laying out your circuit on the board, it makes good sense to have a common positive supply rail,
negative rail and ground rail. remember you will be penalised if your board is not well laid out.
One important bit of advice with regards to your code is to make sure it is easy to read. To this end, you want
to indent it properly and comment it. A important part of designing your code is deciding what to keep in the main
program and what to group as separate functions. Good practice when it comes to this issue is important to the
legibility of your code and its efficiency. Using too many functions slows the code, whereas putting all the code in
one block makes it hard to read. You can start by dividing your code into sub-tasks that it needs to complete, and
then decide whether each task goes into a function or stays in the main body. Usually tasks that are self contained,
take few inputs and generate few, well defined outputs, and also generate a lot of intermediate data are suitable to
be placed inside a function. Similarly well-defined, self-contained tasks that are repeatedly used can be conveniently
placed inside functions. Some Matlab-specific issues to keep in mind include the fact that its indexing starts from 1
and not 0, initialising variables is extremely important (especially when elements will be stored in an array or matrix),
and avoiding loops when possible makes the code faster and more efficient.

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Important Words of Advice

A critical mistake students repeatedly make is that they don’t pay any attention to the datasheets of the components
they are using. You cannot make a reasonable choice of a suitable component if you don’t know what the component
was designed for, what it can do, and the conditions it can handle. As an example, it is common for students to use
small signal transistors and diodes when high power devices are necessary. Another common mistake is to use the
1/4 watt resistors without paying attention to the power dissipation. It is imperative that you look at the datasheets
prior to selecting your components and again in order to connect them correctly.
Another issue is related to your technical skills. A formula produces output that is only as good as the input
and as correct as the understanding of the person using it. Mistakes do occur and your understanding of the theory
becomes crucial to pick these mistakes out. This is not about minor errors (say the difference between a 1k and 995Ω
resistors), but the difference between expecting a resistance in the order of kilo-Ohms, and getting 0.1Ω instead. Such
a situation should immediately ring alarm bells and lead you to check your calculations. Therefore, it is extremely
important to understand the theory behind the equation and be able to know what output to expect.

Additional Information
In addition to the available parts that maybe purchased from the workshop, the following items are relevant:

• A motor/generator set that you will pick up from your lab demonstrator
• A driver circuit for the DC motor that you will pick up from your lab demonstrator
• A SPDT switch and a pair of 10W 10Ω resistors that you can purchase from the workshop.
The motor/generator set, and the driver circuit MUST be returned at the conclusion of the lab.

Motor/Generator Set
Each student is to pick up a motor/generator set that they will keep until the completion of the implementation lab.
While the motor/generator set is with you, you are completely responsible for it. The set must be returned undamaged
to your lab demonstrator at the conclusion of the implementation lab. A block diagram of the system is shown below.
The motor is rated at 9V. You should be aware of the current that it draws. It is also very important that you are
able to model your motor/generator plant. This is in fact necessary and is entirely your responsibility.

Figure 1: Plant model: a motor/generator set.

The Speed Measurement Circuit

An angular speed measurement system is attached to the axle connecting the motor and generator. This consists of
a disk with a hole in it, and a lamp and phototransistor aligned on opposite sides of the disk. Each time the hole
passes the light/phototransistor pair, the latter “sees” the light and turns on producing a narrow pulse in a suitably
designed circuit. A diagram of the speed sensing circuit is shown below: The light is rated at 9V. Consequently both

Figure 2: Speed measurement circuit.

the light and the phototransistor inputs (that is Vs in figure 2) can be obtained directly from the 9V rail voltage used
to power the motor.