Design and Implementation of Electric Drives Laboratory using Commercial Microcontroller Development Kits

A design and implementation of instructional electric drives laboratory at University of Colorado Denver using commercial off-the-shelf microcontroller kits and small motors is described in this paper. The main objective of this project is to provide senior level students with hands-on experience on electric machine drives and industrial microcontroller programming. This laboratory is associated with the electric drives lecture course to enhance their understanding of the theory taught in lectures with tangible examples. Moreover, the skills and experience on electric machines and drives that students gain in this laboratory can be readily applied in their senior design projects that are integrated with motion control components. Experiments, hardware components and instruments about the proposed laboratory course are presented.