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Re:PID Without a PhD (2016) [pdf] by pymzor on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @05:12AM (#16264176)
Thanks for pointing out an obvious reason of why position control for DC motor requires the cascade topology. Always used it, never understood formally why is was required. Just curious : how have you come to this conclusion / explanation ? Do you have any resources on the subject ? I'm still struggling to find a (formal again) rule on what should be the ratio between the outer and inner loop rates.
Re:PID Without a PhD (2016) [pdf] by fest on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @06:08AM (#16264352)
> how have you come to this conclusion / explanation?

Through personal suffering while working on firmware for UAVs (PX4/Ardupilot), CNC controllers (grbl, Marlin), inverted pendulum balancing exercises, RC car control etc.

Sadly, no resources. I guess the best advice I could give on this subject is: increase the visibility of internal state of the system. I have lost track of number of times I've seen people trying to tune PID controller just by outside observation (hmm, looks a bit better than last time) instead of real-time plots of measured process error.

Add high-resolution logging, look at the plots of error and P/I/D terms, have a simulation where you can replay the sensor values and observe the system output.

Re:PID Without a PhD (2016) [pdf] by jackhack on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @10:52AM (#16266219)
You've just summarized the difference between hacking and engineering -- data!

Without data we're just somebody with an opinion. It should be the root of our decisions.