Macintosh IIx and IBM PC Based Automatic Control Laboratory

A Macintosh IIx and IBM PC based automatic control laboratory has been built in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. This laboratory is designed for a required senior mechanical engineering laboratory course, but it is also used by other control related courses. It provides capabilities for teaching system modeling, parameter identification, and design of feedback control systems. The lab experiments focus on control of DC servomotors using Macintosh IIx computers for data acquisition and control. They also include control of stepper motors by an IBM PC compatible computer. The microcomputers are used not only for data acquisition, signal processing and control, but also for analysis and simulation. This paper describes the lab set-up and the associated project tasks