January 2008: This software was written in C++ as a preliminary study for the final project of Real Time System course at the University. The definitive simulator was then written for the real-time OS SHaRK, developed at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of the University of Pisa.

• The Ball and Beam system is a quite famous control exercise: a ball must be balanced on a beam and kept in a certain position.
• The controls in the GUI are few and self-explainatory: In the Controller Gains tab, you can tweak the cascade PID controllers that allows the system to track ball position and beam angle. The default PID gain values work quite well: however, take your time to experiment.
• The two check-boxes allows you to add noise to beam angle and ball position measurement, to test if the controller is robust to real world disturbances.
• You can bother the controller by hitting the ball, just clicking on the bottom left button “Hit the Ball”. The two-state button “Start Controller” toggles the controller ON and OFF.
• You can change the ball position set point with the slider.

Check out the Ball and Plate system I made with Arduino.

Downloads

Ball and Beam simulator program for Windows

SHaRK program source code and binary