HeatShield: a Low-Cost Didactic Device for Control Education Simulating 3D Printer Heater Blocks

This paper proposes a novel open-source didactic device for control systems engineering education that implements the thermal control of a 3D printer heating block as the underlying dynamic process. The teaching aid is built on a printed circuit board copying the physical outline and the standardized electrical connections of the Arduino Uno microcontroller prototyping board. The educational tool described here can be manufactured for a diminutive cost, thus is accessible to students as a take-home experiment. Moreover, it conforms to the design philosophy of the so-called Arduino Shields, thus, it extends the inherent capabilities of the baseboard and may be combined with other available shields. The proposed hardware is augmented by an application programming interface available in C/C++, MATLAB and Simulink. The paper describes the use of this interface and suggests a sample exercise for the grey-box identification of the differential equation representing the system dynamics which was derived by a first-principles approach. The article also acquaints the reader with sample exercises implementing PID control using the various available programming interfaces.