In view of the abstract design content of the control principle controller, the lack of students’ intuitive understanding of the actual control case, and the difficulty of traditional experimental teaching resources to meet the teaching needs due to the constraints of site, time, economic cost and other conditions, a design scheme of the first-order inverted pendulum virtual experiment system based on semi-physical simulation is proposed, and the key technologies of the virtual experiment system are introduced in detail, including the establishment of the physical model of the first-order inverted pendulum, the implementation of customized software and hardware, communication methods between virtual inverted pendulums and embedded targets, etc. Through the virtual experiment system, open automatic control and embedded system experimental teaching can be carried out, so as to achieve the purpose of entertaining, eliminating the boredom of learning control principles, and stimulating students’ enthusiasm for learning.