【正文】 20sim, program CC, VisSim, Extend, and MATLAB are available for desktop PCs and they are within the budgets of most universities and colleges. Some packages (. MATLAB and program CC) are also offered in the form of a lowcost student edition and students can purchase and use these packages on their own PCs, away from the university laboratories. Simulation is an invaluable tool in teaching the theory of control system. For example, the student can plot the accurate rootlocus of a plex System in a matter of a few minutes rather than spending several hours. Similarly, the time and frequency responds of a system can very easily be plotted with the aid of simulator package. Although the simulators are very useful tools they are not same as real world solutions. There are also cases in which puter models may be inappropriate, or the system is too plex to describe by mathematical equations in a puter. It is the authors’ experience that students learn an engineering topic best when they see the physical results of the experiments they perform. Simulation can still be used at the first level of the analysis but this should be supported with real physical laboratory experiments. Thus, simulators should be a plementary tool rather than the only tool when teaching an engineering topic. One of the problems with mercially available physical laboratory experiments is that the experimental kits are usually very expensive, especially when a number of similar kits are purchased for teaching purpose. Such kits may also require frequent calibration and maintenance services as a result of ponent failures and ageing. Laboratory kits also do bee obsolete quite rapidly as new products are developed. This paper describes a lowcost temperature control kit which is designed and used in the engineering teaching laboratories of Near East University. The kit is based on the popular PIC16F877 model microcontroller, manufactured by Microchip Inc. The overall cost of the kit is less than $200, which is well below the cost of similar mercially available educational temperature control kits. The design, modeling and digital control of the kit are described in detail. Temperature control kit Educational temperature control kits are not new. Many panies manufacturing laboratory kits also offer some kind of general process control or temperature control by Kuruganti is a temperature control loop trainer which is intended to show how the temperature in a heat exchanger can be controlled. TCL1, also by Kuruganti, is an on/offbased temperature control teaching kit. PROCON by Feedback Instruments is a progress control system, which includes rigs for level, flow, temperature and pH control. Here, the temperature control system uses water as the process fluid and the kid provide PID control with autotune facilities. G34/EV is a PIDbased educational temperature control unit manufactured by Elettronica. The unit can be interfaced to a PC and consists of a PID controller, power amplifier, and signal conditioner for temperature sensors. Near East University offers undergraduate and graduate level engineering courses and control engineering is one of these topics, which is taught for one semester. There are no practical experiments and students have been using the MATLAB package to design, simulate and test their control theory. It was felt necessary to provide some practical experiments to the students as a way of supporting the theoretical concepts taught in the classroom. The main reason to design a control kit rather than to buy a mercially available one was the cost. Process control is a very important field of automatic control engineering and as a first initiative it was decided to develop a digital temperature control experiment based upon a microcontroller. One of the aims during the implantation of this laboratory kit was to use low cost, but industrial equipment in order to ensure the necessary robustness for its use. It is hoped to develop more controlbased experiments in the near future with the participation of members of the faculty and students. The block diagram of the digital temperature control kit is shown in . The working principle of this experiment consists of heating the water in a small container using a lowvoltage electric heating element and a simple MOSFETbased power controller circuit. A temperature sensor is immersed into the water whose output signal is sent to a PICtype microcontroller. This signal is pared with a reference temperature signal and a PID controller algorithm is implemented by the microcontroller to achieve the required temperature control action. This process is used to teach the following important concepts to the students: 外文翻譯原文 Teaching digital control using a lowcost microcontrollerbased temperature control kit Abstract The design of a lowcost digital temperature control kit is described. The system enables the students to implement various control strategies using a microcontroller. The kit is intended to be helpful in a control laboratory as a plement to the digital control system theory taught to undergraduate students. K