This article presents an open-source device illustrating the well-known magnetic levitation experiment. The uniqueness of this particular device lies in its exceptionally small dimensions, affordability and availability, which makes it a perfect design for take-home experiments for education but it can also serve as a referential design for testing various control algorithms in research. In addition, this paper provides a comprehensive hardware design for reproducibility along with the detailed derivation of the mathematical model, system identification and validation. Moreover, the introduced hardware comes with an easy-to-use open-source application programming interface in C/C++ for the Arduino IDE, Simulink and CircuitPython. REXYGEN, another environment similar to Simulink, had also been used to demonstrate the capabilities of the MagnetoShield.

This article presents a reference design for the well-known ball-on-beam laboratory experiment, where a spherical ball without direct actuation is only balanced by the inclination of a supporting structure, such as beam, rail or tube. The design introduced here is completely open-source and utilizes only a handful of off-the-shelf components and 3D printing; resulting in an exceptionally low hardware cost. Moreover, the resulting apparatus fits on a standard expansion module format, known as a Shield, which is compatible with a range of microcontroller prototyping boards from the Arduino ecosystem. This affordable, small, reproducible and open design is thus intended to aid control systems or mechatronics education via hands-on student experiments or even conducting research on a budget. In addition to the hardware design with downloadable project files, we also present an application programming interface and the results of a demonstration example here.