Undergraduate student experience in development of ZVS power converter for voltage control with low cost microcontroller

This paper presents an integration of a low cost microcontroller with a power converter for controlling the output voltage. Here, it will benefit the UTHM final year student in order to apply what have been taught during Power Electronics subject in Year 3. The power converter that has been developed is the zero voltage switching (ZVS) with inverter voltage control mechanism. As for the microcontroller application, the Raspberry Pi has been used. A test on open loop and closed loop conditions have been applied using Proportional Integral (PI) control for controlling the Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) signal pattern for inverter output in hardware experiment test. The PI controller is developed and simulated using the MATLAB/Simulink software and then downloaded to the Arduino and Raspberry Pi microcontroller boards for testing purposes. At the end of the project, the students are able to understand more especially on integrating the control mechanism to the microcontroller device using a power converter in order to achieve the control target output.