Joran Booth, Ph.D. in Mech. Eng.

In the spring of 2023, I taught an introductory mechanical design course in which students built a ball-balancing robot.

The ball-balancing robot relies on PID control for determining the arm position based on a distance sensor. However, a common challenge encountered by students is tuning the PID parameters, which in a more typical application requires the code to be re-uploaded to the microcontroller.

For this project, I anticipated that customer requirement by using three potentiometers which could be turned to manually adjust the PID parameters on the fly. The end result was instead of a couple of minutes between updates, students could tweak their code in microseconds, significantly reducing student frustration and improving their experience.

The circuit also includes typical components of the PCB, which was run through two versions. The students were also taught to use MultiSim and UltiBoard following the design I provided. This impacted the choice of microcontroller, the exclusive use of through-hole components, and the use of a wall wart power supply.