A Versatile and Low-Cost Platform for Advanced Power Electronics Experiments

Abstract

Commercial power electronics laboratory platforms remain either prohibitively expensive or limited to a single converter topology, restricting student exposure to modern digital control challenges. This paper presents a versatile, low-cost didactic platform built from off-the-shelf components, the Infineon (Munich, Germany) XMC4700 microcontroller and the STMicroelectronics (Geneva, Switzerland) X-NUCLEO-IHM07M1 motor-driver expansion board, engineered to support multiple power electronics experiments without altering the core power board. The platform exploits the L6230 three-phase DMOS driver as a reconfigurable set of three independent half-bridges, enabling closed-loop DC/DC conversion, brushed DC motor speed control, and three-phase inverter operation on a single physical setup. The software workflow combines the XMC4700’s DAVE™ Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with PLECS simulation and C-script code block, allowing students to validate control strategies in simulation before porting them to hardware with minimal adaptation. Real-time supervisory control is provided through Micrium μC/Probe XMC (Florida, United States), eliminating the recompile–reflash cycle during tuning. Each of the three case studies is documented with complete schematics, control diagrams, and experimental waveforms. The platform is a highly cost-effective alternative to both commercial educational benches and previously published academic development platforms, relies entirely on freely available and educationally accessible software tools, and has been experimentally validated in two different power electronics courses.