Beautiful introduction.

I remember my PID lab in college - we had two plexiglass towers with water in them and a pump - our task was to calculate the PID parameters so that one of the columns reached a certain level. I think it was measured by a buoy, so we had a pretty noisy input to begin with, but that was part of the problem at hand.

It was a great introduction because the lab was 2h and the pump rather slow, so we couldn't just half-ass it.