The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a transformative technology with great potential in various sectors, including home automation, industrial control, environmental monitoring, agriculture, wearables, health monitoring, and others. The growing presence of IoT devices stimulates schools and academic institutions to integrate IoT into the educational process, since IoT skills are in demand in the labor market. This paper presents educational IoT tools and technologies that simplify the design, implementation, and testing of IoT applications. The article presents the introductory IoT course that students perform initially and then presents some of the projects that they develop and implement on their own later in the project.

The design of modern industrial products is further improved through the hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation. Realistic simulation is enabled by the closed loop between the hardware under test (HUT) and real-time simulation. Such a system involves a field programmable gate array (FPGA) and digital signal processor (DSP). An HIL model can bypass serious damage to the real object, reduce debugging cost, and, finally, reduce the comprehensive effort during the testing. This paper provides a historical overview of HIL simulations through different engineering challenges, i.e., within automotive, power electronics systems, and different industrial drives. Various platforms, such as National Instruments, dSPACE, Typhoon HIL, or MATLAB Simulink Real-Time toolboxes and Speedgoat hardware systems, offer a powerful tool for efficient and successful investigations in different fields. Therefore, HIL simulation practice must begin already during the university’s education process to prepare the students for professional engagements in the industry, which was also verified experimentally at the end of the paper.

This paper investigates a control approach for achieving reliable zero-voltage switching transitions within the entire operating range of a conventional nonisolated bidirectional dc-dc converter that utilizes synchronous rectification. The approach is based on operation in the discontinuous conduction mode with a constant reversed current of sufficient amplitude, which is achieved by load-dependent variation of the switching frequency. This paper focuses on the obtained resonant voltage transitions and provides analytical models for determining the reversed current and timing parameters that would ensure safe, reliable, and highly efficient operation of the converter. In addition, the proposed approach solves the synchronous transistor's spurious turn-on and body diode reverse recovery induced issues, does not require any additional components or circuitry for its realization, and can be entirely implemented within a digital signal controller. The effectiveness and performance of the presented control approach was confirmed in a 1-kW experimental bidirectional dc-dc converter that achieved 97% efficiency over a wide range of output powers at switching frequencies above 100 kHz.

This paper describes a complete digitally controlled dc-dc buck converter performed by field-programmable gate array (FPGA) circuitry. The voltage and current-mode control is based on a voltage control oscillator (VCO) performed measurements regarding output-voltage and inductor current, respectively. This measurement principle also uses digital-counters (digital-integrators) in order to obtain integral values for the output-voltage and inductor current. In analog current-mode control, the instantaneous inductor current-value-measurement is used for the switching action. When the VCO is used for the inductor current measurement, the integral is measured during the switching-on time set as an observation interval and the switching action occurs based on this measurement. Such a principle enables full digitalization of the voltage- and current-control loop and also the used measurement principle is capable of rejecting the switching disturbances during current and voltage measurements. All the tasks for current and voltage control were implemented within the FPGA. The algorithm was verified by simulation and experimentation at a switching-frequency of 25kHz.

All electric vehicles are the only way to decarbonize transport quickly and substantially. Although multilevel inverters have already been used in some transportation modes, they are rarely used in road transportation, especially in light-duty passenger BEVs. With the transition to a high 800-V DC link to extend the driving range and enable extreme fast charging, the possibility of using multilevel inverters in commercial light-duty passenger BEVs becomes feasible. Higher efficiency, higher power density, better waveform quality, lower switching frequency, the possibility of using low-rated switches, and inherent fault tolerance are known advantages of multilevel inverters that make them an efficient option for replacing 2-level inverters in high DC link passenger BEVs. This paper discusses high DC link voltage benefits in light-duty passenger BEVs, presents the state-of-the-art of different conventional multilevel inverter topologies used in BEVs, and compares them with conventional 2-level inverters from different aspects and limitations. Based on commercial upper-class passengers’ BEV data and a review of multilevel inverters on the market, future trends and possible research areas are identified.

This study discusses a converter structure appropriate for charging the batteries of an electric vehicle (EV). The structure is obtained by a transformation of a conventional three‐phase inverter, which is already present in an EV's power‐train system. Since the motor inverter's semiconductor components and the electric motor's windings form the battery charger's circuit, a reduction in the power‐train system's size and weight is achievable. The proposed fully integrated battery charger operates alternately in two modes, buck and boost, while providing power factor (PF) correction capability continuously. This study also proposes an input current control strategy that ensures smooth operating mode transitions, which occur during the operation of a battery charger. The control is entirely implemented within a microcontroller and ensures operation with a high PF and low total harmonic distortion of the input current. The performance of the discussed converter using the proposed control scheme was verified experimentally.