zombiess
10 MW
Decided to give another development platform a try, the Piccalo with Instaspin. This is much more advanced than the PIC processors I'm use to. I also have to dust off my C programming skills which have not been utilized in +10 years. Need to take a refresher on the basics.
Good news is I've started the tutorials which are not exactly straight forward. Took me longer to figure out exactly what order I needed to do things in. After a few hours of going over loads of documentation, I finally figured out how to use the tutorial and installed all the required software. Getting the motor to ID and spin was actually the easy part LOL. I'm glad that I had experience with Lebowski's setup as it's come in handy. A lot of the parameters I need to set are similar to his, as are some of the noises made during the measuring of the motor parameters.
Both setups make their measurements differently. Lebowski does his resistance and inductance measurements for FOC without needing the motor to move. Instaspin spins the motor for many of the measurements.
Figured this setup was worth the $66 it cost for the LAUNCHXL-F28027F with the BOOSTXL-DRV8301 (24v, 20A output stage) to experiment with. I'm impressed with the control algorithm so far and I'm only through about half the tutorials.
If you are interested in motor control and are comfortable with complex IDEs for doing development (I'm not much of a programmer) it's worth checking out. Be warned though, it's not exactly for a beginner.
Not sure where I'll go with this, but I like it so far and it's starting to make more sense to me. This is the part most people seem to figure out first, then they struggle with the gate driver / power stage. Motor control programming and power stage design go hand in hand, but they are VERY different skill sets.
I think I'm starting to understand why so many commercial controllers with decent to good interfaces have not so good power stage designs. Designing a complete controller is not an easy task at all, at least not something powerful and reliable.
The more I read about Instapin and understand what it's capable of, the more impressed I am. The motion control version is really cool based on some videos I've seen.
Good news is I've started the tutorials which are not exactly straight forward. Took me longer to figure out exactly what order I needed to do things in. After a few hours of going over loads of documentation, I finally figured out how to use the tutorial and installed all the required software. Getting the motor to ID and spin was actually the easy part LOL. I'm glad that I had experience with Lebowski's setup as it's come in handy. A lot of the parameters I need to set are similar to his, as are some of the noises made during the measuring of the motor parameters.
Both setups make their measurements differently. Lebowski does his resistance and inductance measurements for FOC without needing the motor to move. Instaspin spins the motor for many of the measurements.
Figured this setup was worth the $66 it cost for the LAUNCHXL-F28027F with the BOOSTXL-DRV8301 (24v, 20A output stage) to experiment with. I'm impressed with the control algorithm so far and I'm only through about half the tutorials.
If you are interested in motor control and are comfortable with complex IDEs for doing development (I'm not much of a programmer) it's worth checking out. Be warned though, it's not exactly for a beginner.
Not sure where I'll go with this, but I like it so far and it's starting to make more sense to me. This is the part most people seem to figure out first, then they struggle with the gate driver / power stage. Motor control programming and power stage design go hand in hand, but they are VERY different skill sets.
I think I'm starting to understand why so many commercial controllers with decent to good interfaces have not so good power stage designs. Designing a complete controller is not an easy task at all, at least not something powerful and reliable.
The more I read about Instapin and understand what it's capable of, the more impressed I am. The motion control version is really cool based on some videos I've seen.