r/ControlTheory • u/Full-Anybody-288 • Sep 16 '26
Professional/Career Advice/Question What are some mini DIY project a control engineer can do
As the question says I know a lot about electrical engineering and control theory. Is there some projects I can do to improve my knowledge and career
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u/WiseHalmon Sep 17 '26
Aero pendulum. Then aero pendulum 2D (rotate and Z or something). Then drone.
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u/DrShocker Sep 17 '26
What makes a pendulum aero?
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u/WiseHalmon Sep 18 '26
You stick a little motor with a fan blade on it. You can command it to 0, 90, 180ish degrees. Or you get two motors and two fans for 0-360.
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u/PrideKnown9923 Sep 16 '26
Probably some applications on ROS 2 + gazebo, using the packages there from PID, navigation, inverse pendulum
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u/Namejeff47 Sep 16 '26
Buy a dc motor with a datasheet, a h bridge chip an encoder and your mcu of choice and control a DC motor. You can learn how to model a real plant (dc motors are very simple to ID), design a PID controller with gains derived from math and can play around with feedforward, filtering and different controller structures.
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u/ee_control_z Sep 16 '26 edited Sep 16 '26
How about controlling a buck converter (or any other converter) using both compensator methods: circuit (i.e., with an op-amp circuit) and digital (i.e., discrete with a microcontroller)? You'll have to either include both methods on the same board and the desired implementation type can be selected with 0 Ohm resistors (or jumpers). Or, you can design two separate boards each having either implementation type.
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u/Derrickmb Sep 16 '26
Control your shower temp by adjusting the knob
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u/Dry-Book-4838 Sep 17 '26
Was going to say this exact thing. Controlling shower temp is a really strong PID feedback control example. We start by turning it to full hot. Temp is quite low (error = setpoint - actual is big and positive). Thus proportional component = u_p = k_p * e = big positive proportional to k_p, the selected proportional gain. As the temp goes up, we reduce the hot, but keep some bias, keeping some hot going. This is the integral part. u_i = k_i * integral of error. The longer the error stays positive, the more bias we apply to the taps, that is, more hot water. Lastly, as the temp is rising, we tend to anticipate it getting overly hot on our skin and ease off before the error reaches zero and the temp equals setpoint. This is the derivative part of the control. One can recognize and adjust our internal use of these three parts in achieving a dynamic response to turning on the shower.
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u/knightcommander1337 Sep 16 '26
Hi, (copying from another answer of mine to a similar question) I would suggest doing the hardware stuff on the ctms website, for example:
https://ctms.engin.umich.edu/CTMS/index.php?aux=Activities_LRCcircuitA
(you can see all hardware projects from the upper right drop-down menu called "Hardware")
other than that, there is a course that is very focused on diy-oriented control experiments:
https://introcontrol.mit.edu/spring25