I worked with a team of engineering students to operate and analyze a Magnetic Levitation System designed to suspend and control a small metal ball. The system used an electromagnet positioned above the ball and a position sensor that output a voltage signal corresponding to the ball’s height. We created a PID controller in LabVIEW to compare the ball’s position to a target height and adjust the electromagnet voltage to maintain levitation.

The controller was configured to operate in multiple modes: maintaining a fixed height, following a square wave, a sinusoidal wave, and a random input. We tuned the PID parameters—proportional gain (Kp), integral time (Ti), and derivative time (Td)—to achieve stable levitation.