In the beginning…
I have been wanting to work with the hardware for an inverted pendulum for a while. A year or two ago I developed a coding challenge involving an inverted pendulum that I want to run using NI software. The ideal situation would be to use the NI Control Design and Simulation module to simulate a physical system. The competition would be run using the simulation, then the winning entry could be transferred to the real hardware. I was working with some folks at NI on the idea, but we never really got anywhere.
I started thinking about the challenge again, and decided I needed to have a system that I could use here to run the challenge properly. At first I thought about borrowing a system from NI, but that didn’t look feasible. I started looking at prices and figured I could build my own for a few hundred dollars.