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Re:Excellent Explaination of a PID Controller Implemented on... by durkie on Tuesday May 13, 2014 @11:33AM (#7738626)
These are the bread-and-butter of a huge amount of industrial process controls. Tuning them can be a bitch though.

And unforunately, with the proliferation of cheap prototyping platforms and sensors, there are an abundance of projects and kickstarters out there aiming to be home automation / garden automation / mushroom farm systems / etc that try to implement process control without even knowing the existence of PID algorithms and they just do dumb behavior: temperature too low -> turn on heater. temperature too high -> turn off heater, etc.

Re:Excellent Explaination of a PID Controller Implemented on... by doctoboggan on Tuesday May 13, 2014 @11:48AM (#7738733)
The algorithm you described is known as "bang-bang"[0]. For some systems it is an adequate control strategy.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang%E2%80%93bang_control