Floating Ball, PID Control Demonstration System

This is a floating ball in a tube demonstration system for students. It shows how feedback control can compensate for disturbances, such as reducing airflow by using a finger to close a vent. Students learn how changing the PID gain affects the ball's height. PID stands for proportional, integral and derivative. There is no math here, just intuition. The small screen shows the PID gain values as well as the ball height over time. This allows the visualization of a "step response". This means the change of ball height over time, trying to reach the desired height (mid-tube point) as quickly as possible, right after the controller is turned on. The system was built as a Bachelor Senior Design project in Electrical Engineering Technology at Michigan Tech, and the code was later improved upon by Dylan Cook. I, Nathir Rawashdeh am the faculty mentor and idea originator. The design is published in a paper and the code can be shared upon request since it is still being fine-tuned. Citation: Kevin Zender, Corey Blankenship, Tyson Joseph Bethke, Nathir A Rawashdeh, "Design of a Portable Levitating Ball PID Control Trainer System and Curriculum for Electrical Engineering Technology Students", 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access July 2021, DOI: 10.18260/1-2--36919 Link to Paper https://peer.asee.org/design-of-a-portable-levitating-ball-pid-control-trainer-system-and-curriculum-for-electrical-engineering-technology-students