Car Test Rig

Hi Guys,

I'm completely new to Arduino and need some advice.

I've just started a years work placement at a formula 1 racing team. My manager has given me a project to develop an Arduino system to control different aspects of test rigs. He has been quite vague as to the exact application and said he really wants a kind of generic PID program that can be used for different things.

As an example one of the uses it could be using a linear POT and an actuator to control the ride height of a model in a wind tunnel or a wind speed sensor and throttle control to control exhaust gases output etc.

In themselves they are probably quite simple but i was wondering if it would be possible to use a user interface created in Visual Basic to be able to enter differnet variables and maybe even print out some data in a spreadsheet?

Anyway I'm a complete novice, I've used a bit of visual basic before but any help or advice would be really appreciated.

Thanks

Sam.

Yes this is possible.

But first have you seen/used the serial monitor?

And then your program will need to look for data from the uno and keyboard input (to send command to the uno at the same time).

You could adapt the code for the serial monitor however its written in java. Here's a link to the source code Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting.

If you do want to try out java then get a copy of netbeans its a free all singing and dancing IDE for java and c.

Mark

The PID really needs to be tuned to the behaviour of the system it is controlling.

If you want a generic one, I would suggest you stick the Arduino in a box with three potentiometer controls labeled P I and D and use those to adjust the PID algorithm. It would probably also be a good idea to use a reasonably good motor shield to drive the actuator, and use a switch mode power supply to enable your controller to tolerate a wide range of supply voltages. And adopt whatever connectors seem most widely used for the power supply, input pot and output stepper motor connections. Presumably, people will be wanting to swap these around for different applications.