

Excellent Explaination of a PID Controller Implemented on an Arduino - doctoboggan
http://brettbeauregard.com/blog/2011/04/improving-the-beginners-pid-introduction/

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galvanist
I had to look it up. From wikipedia:

A proportional-integral-derivative controller (PID controller) is a control
loop feedback mechanism (controller) widely used in industrial control systems
[...] A PID controller calculates an "error" value as the difference between a
measured process variable and a desired setpoint. The controller attempts to
minimize the error in outputs by adjusting the process control inputs.

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durkie
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.

~~~
doctoboggan
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang%E2%80%93bang_control)

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eggie5
I just implemented this on my senior project autonomous vehicle:
[http://sharknado.sdsu.edu](http://sharknado.sdsu.edu)

