A commonly used hardware in-the-loop environment is the dSPACE system, whose strength is aimed at high flexibility and processing speed, but involves rather costly hardware and software license fees. In our proposed paper we elaborate a scalable hardware platform running a low-cost RTLinux open source system of comparable processing speed.

There is a great variety of applications that need such rapid control prototyping systems. Especially developers of electromechanical plants are using rapid control prototyping systems to tune less known system parameters and controller settings. These needs are well covered by the software environment MATLAB/Simulink and the “Simulink Target for Real — Time Linux” (STRTL toolbox). STRTL was developed within the Ph.D. thesis of R. M. Garcia on which our system is based upon. Unfortunately STRTL is no longer actively supported and provides only certain drivers for a limited set of hardware in its initial design.

In our work we extended the driver concept of STRTL to the well known driver interface standard comedi. This enables the STRTL to use all the hardware supported by comedi.

In this proposed paper we show the applicability of our package to control an electric drive used in a student lab course aimed at familiarizing the students with controller systems.

The paper is organized as follows:

First the requirement for this rapid control prototyping system are detailed. Secondly the comedi-STRTL driver is discussed in detail. Finally we demonstrate the successful application of this extension by means of an electric drive controller. We conclude our paper with some remarks and the reference to our website where this extension can be downloaded freely.

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