Nowadays, Rapid Control Prototyping (RCP) is a term familiar in control engineering. The evolution of RCP enables engineers to quickly respond to the requirements on fast development cycles and complex control strategies. However, a complete RCP platform requires relatively expensive software and hardware. This paper proposes a low-cost RCP paradigm attractive to control engineers who have modest requirements on real-time performance. Through experimental evaluation, the low-cost RCP paradigm is shown to be viable for laboratory kits and small control applications.