EE3CL4: Additional Resources

Lecture capture and live streaming

The lectures for this course will be live-streamed and captured using the Echo 360 system. You can access them from Avenue to Learn.

Online companion to the 11th edition of the text book

The publishers provided an interesting online companions to the 11th edition of the text book. It is available for free and provides some interesting exercises that would help develop and assess your understanding of the core principles of the course. You can find the companion by clicking on the following link. There are also some additional on-line features of the 12th edition that are available directly from the publisher for an additional fee. (Variants for the 13th edition are on their way, apparently.) Although I will not refer to those features directly, they may be of interest to some students.

Other Textbooks

If you have difficulty with the textbook or the notes, the following books offer high-quality treatments of similar material from slightly different perspectives. They are recommended.

For those of you who find Schaum's Outlines useful, there is one that is relevant to this course:

For those looking for an advanced perspective on this introductory material, two useful text books are:

The following book takes a somewhat different approach, emphasizing an appreciation of the fundamentals and the development of insight:

For those looking for an introduction to digital control of physical systems, two useful text books are:

For those looking for a more conceptual discussion of the principles of feedback and control, consider:

Online resources

The are a number of online resources for education in the area of control systems. Although I am not in a position to endorse any of them, what I can say is that in 2013 a number of EE3CL4 students said that they found the online lectures by Brian Douglas to be quite helpful.

Another interesting online resource is the "Experience Controls" mobile application developed by Quanser. It was released in 2019 and provides a combination of concentrated theory and interactive exercises. It might be a helpful complement to the lectures. It is available in the App Store and on Google Play. Quanser have also developed a podcast channel of the same name. It should be available where you get your favourite podcasts.

Technical papers on specific topics

The following papers provide additional details on some of the fundamental results that we will use in class. The papers in the IEEE journals can be obtained by going to the library web site, searching the catalogue for "IEEE Xplore", accessing that electronic resource, and then searching IEEE Xplore for the paper. The paper in Control Engineering Practice, can be found by searching for that journal on the library site.

Software toolboxes for control system design

Some of you may wish to explore control system design concepts using software tools that have been customized for this purpose. A prominent example of such a tool is the Among many other things, it offers simple ways to represent transfer functions, calculate the transfer functions of cascaded blocks and feedback loops, and finding poles and zeros of transfer functions. It also offers simple interfaces for plotting the step response of a system, responses to other inputs, root locus diagrams, and Bode and Nyquist diagrams. An interesting feature is the Control Systems Designer App (formerly known as the SISO Design Tool) that offers some helpful numerical acceleration of some of the design processes that we will use, and offers an engaging user interface.

Some other software toolboxes that offer similar functionality (perhaps with the exception of the user interface in the Designer App), and indeed can be implemented using similar syntax are:


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Tim Davidson (davidson@mcmaster.ca).