Dr.Yaramasu currently teaches Electric Drives and Advanced Electric Drives courses at Northern Arizona University. These co-convened courses use dSPACE DS1104 and MATLAB/Simulink based hardware labs that are designed and distributed by the University of Minnesota These hardware labs are quite expensive with dSPACE hardware costing $4000 per unit and software upgrades costing $300 per unit.
The problem is that upgrading or adding hardware and software with this solution is very expensive. It’s also extremely difficult for students to replicate this solution at home. This is continuation project from AY19-20. The last year’s students verified that all the dSPACE based experiments can be implemented with the Arduino control board which is cheaper than the dSPACE hardware. Also, to design the circuit diagram for the electric drove labs will need MATLAB/Simulink as a software. The objective for this year’s capstone team is to design compact inverter board and combine with the Arduino controller and make the kits ready for deployment at NAU. This work could be used as a prototype for using Arduinos in the Electric Drives class at NAU or any other university. This work could make Electrical Engineering curriculum more accessible to universities that don’t have expensive hardware to support an electric drives class.
*Updated Feature
We have connected the Arduino to the inverter board by the 37-pin female connector and the encoder by using the 15-pin female connector. In the dSPACE circuit for lab 1, we had to redesign the circuit so the Arduino can read the code generated by the Simulink after recreating the circuit. One of our requirements was to redesign the inverter board, but we could not redesign the board because of the lack of time. Also, we could not redesign all the labs and test them because of the lack of time and the pandemic situation.
