RTE-SIM: a simple, low-cost and flexible environment to support the teaching of real-time and embedded control

Contemporary teaching of real-time control, basic elements of which are part of a modern control engineering syllabus, can be restricted by the availability of laboratory space and the high costs of equipment, development tools and test beds. This paper describes RTE-SIM - a novel, flexible and low-cost environment developed by the authors to help alleviate these problems. The environment is in the form of an ARM7 microcontroller-based hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) environment. The paper describes each component in the HIL configuration, followed by an example of a typical student exercise. Most institutions can implement the proposed environment with few (if any) additional cost, space or time penalties incurred, and based on initial experiences of its use, some possible areas of future development are suggested.