Using an integrated script control unit (ISCU) to assist the power electronics education

Abstract

An integrated script control unit (ISCU) is invented to work as the digital controller in power electronics educations. The ISCU mainly consists of two parts, a control board and computer software. The computer software enables college students to write specific scripts, which can be compiled and saved on the control board, to design the control flow and algorithms. The processor on the board will realize the algorithms that are designed by the user. All of the variables can be monitored by the computer software, which is helpful to find the bugs in the algorithms. ISCU can help the under-graduate students to design converters even if they are unfamiliar with the programming languages and developing environment. Users can write and validate algorithms for converters quickly without writing any tedious codes (such as initialization, dealing with the interrupts) for specific processors with ISCU. The college students who lack the necessary skills to program the processor, can benefit when they are studying the power electronic techniques. Importantly, the ISCU is considered to be free for everyone. The details and the principles of ISCU are introduced, and a bi-directional DC-DC converter is built based on ISCU to validate the proposed characteristics.