Designing the HMI for a DC Motor Toolkit for Control Engineering Education

The aim of this article is to design a Human Machine Interface (HMI) for a direct current (DC) motor toolkit. This toolkit is designed to teach the concepts of control engineering to undergraduate engineering students. The kit itself has been developed over the course of a decade by several refinements from in-class engagement and feedback from several batches of undergraduate learners. The kit can be connected to a computer through a USB port and can be provided inputs through it. The key challenge is to design a suitable HMI to support the operation of the toolkit to enable learning of control engineering concepts. In this quest, this article uses an integrated Ecological Interface Design (iEID) process, which is specifically created to design interfaces for interfaces in technological and sociotechnical sectors. The iEID process is spread over nine steps and begins with defining of the scope of the problem and resulting in the final interface. This process enables the development of the HMI in a systematic manner taking into account the technical considerations as well as issues related to the conduct of activities, which enable the learning of control engineering concepts. Although the focus of this article is on control engineering, it also demonstrates how interfaces can be designed to support the engineering education sector, in terms of interface and information design, beyond that of control engineering.