OpenMCT: an open-source hardware DC motor control educational kit

Control engineering is used in multiple engineering domains, but most introductory courses lean heavily on mathematical manipulation and simulation. This can limit students’ exposure to real-world applications, often at the cost of student engagement. To promote a system-level approach, this work describes OpenMCT, a low-cost, open-source educational kit for DC motor control that enables hands-on experiments covering topics from actuation and sensing to sampling and real-time control execution, while also touching on other engineering topics students encounter in practice, such as drive electronics, measurement conditioning, and filtering. The hardware integrates a brushed DC motor, incremental encoder feedback, motor current sensing, and an H-bridge driver controlled by a Teensy 4 microcontroller. A cross-platform Python/Qt GUI provides configuration, live telemetry, excitation signals, data logging, and interactive controller tuning, including PID and direct entry of z-domain difference-equation coefficients. Validation follows the workflow commonly taught in control courses, going from calibration, characterization, and system identification through to controller design and deployment. Experimental results show that system identification and closed-loop responses follow the trends predicted by the GUI-based analysis and simulations.