This brief presents a low cost hardware-in-the-loop experimental design for large ship course control with actuator in the form of hybrid circuit, which can effectively capture the essential properties of friction and provide a more realistic environment to perform test. According to the Coulomb plus static friction model formulation, the velocity decision circuit, the absolute value circuit and the friction decision circuit are designed based on the basic circuit components and are validated by a series of simulations, respectively. Besides, the circuit of PID controller and the linear model of steering gear are also added to generate the closed-loop actuator. In addition, the model of the ship and the corresponding PID course controller are realized by the algorithm in the computer. The numerical model and the circuit implementation of realistic actuator can exchange information to establish a hardware-in-the-loop experimental platform. Finally, several experiments are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed low-cost system.