Spin BLDC Motors In Minutes

Sept. 11, 2012
According to Texas Instruments, its four new compatible motor-control kits can spin three-phase brushless dc (BLDC) motors in as little as minutes.

Dallas, TX, USA: According to Texas Instruments, its four new compatible motor-control kits can spin three-phase brushless dc (BLDC) motors in as little as minutes. The idea behind the kits is to allow developers to scale their product lines using TI MCUs ranging from 16-bit ultra-low-power MSP430 devices to 32-bit, ARM-based, floating-point Hercules safety and Stellaris MCU solutions.

The kits contain object-oriented software functions and drivers that make coding easy and compatible, which simplifies portability across TI MCU and motor driver families. Also included is a reliable, fully protected motor driver monitoring cycle-by-cycle overcurrent, overtemperature, cross-conduction, and undervoltage situations.  Such integrated protection reduces design complexity and board space, as well as ensures higher system reliability.

A plug-in controlCARD module lets developers choose the right combination of motor driver for voltage, current, and experimentation with different MCUs for control. All kits have the required firmware to run TI’s sensorless InstaSPIN-BLDC motor-control software solution out-of-the-box.

InstaSPIN-BLDC is a free back-electromagnetic field (EMF) technique that spins any motor (without sensors) in seconds without knowledge of a motor’s parameters. Unlike traditional back-EMF zero-crossing techniques, InstaSPIN-BLDC extends sensorless operation to lower speeds and is highly immune to miscommutation caused by rapid speed changes.

The Stellaris kit also includes a sensorless sliding mode observer (SMO) field-oriented control (FOC) speed plus torque control application. The Hercules kits add firmware for sensored (encoder) speed plus torque control with SMO as sensorless redundancy for safety systems.

Texas Instruments

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