Motor Drive & Control Blog

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Get Your Motor Running: Speed Loops

Posted 19 days ago

by Michael Firth
- 5 Comments
It’s amazing where the mind goes when doing something it would rather not, or more to the point, doing something borderline painful. For example, during today’s spin class, as the teacher was screaming to the class to maintain greater than...
Field Oriented Control Just Got WAY Simpler!

Posted 29 days ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 2 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments At 6:31 a.m. on Feb. 26, if you were wearing your motor control goggles, you would have seen a bright flash in the skies over Texas. TI finally announced its long-awaited new sensorless...
Teaching Your PI Controller to Behave (Part X)

Posted 1 month ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 2 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments Throughout this series we have discussed a practical and efficient way to tune the PI controllers in a cascaded velocity loop by simply choosing a factor that determines the desired damping...
Engineer It― Understanding basic sensored BLDC operation

Posted 1 month ago

by Victoria Smithee
- 0 Comments
Spinning a BLDC motor may be as simple as activating electromagnet pole pairs. If you turn on and sequence these pole pairs correctly, the rotor will rotate 360 degrees. One of the most important things to consider is the timing of this activation. That’s...
Teaching Your PI Controller to Behave (Part IX)

Posted 1 month ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 1 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments At last! Let’s take what we have learned so far and see how it applies to Field Oriented Control (FOC) systems. Figure 1 shows a typical field oriented system incorporating TI’s...
Get Your Motor Running – How to select a motor driver

Posted 2 months ago

by Michael Firth
- 0 Comments
I recently returned from a trip to Germany where I spent the week visiting customers in and around the Stuttgart region. Outside the lack of sun (apparently it was the darkest winter season in 40 years), the area was pretty amazing with a high concentration...
Teaching Your PI Controller to Behave (Part VIII)

Posted 2 months ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 0 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments We are now on the eight part of a ten part series about teaching your PI controller to behave like you want it to. At the heart of this discussion is a proposed tuning technique which allows...
Teaching Your PI Controller to Behave (Part VII)

Posted 2 months ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 0 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments So far we have discussed the PI tuning problem in the context of a linear system. This is because under steady-state conditions when the system transients settle out, you will probably be...
Teaching Your PI Controller to Behave (Part VI)

Posted 2 months ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 0 Comments
Dave Wilson , Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments I am writing this particular blog installment while lying by a swimming pool in a resort on the Riviera Maya. There are lots of beautiful distractions which are competing for my attention...
Teaching Your PI Controller to Behave (Part V)

Posted 2 months ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 2 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments So far in this series, we have discussed how to distill the design of a cascaded velocity controller from a bunch of seemingly uncorrelated PI coefficients down to a single system parameter;...
Simplifying stepper and BLDC motor drivers

Posted 3 months ago

by Ryan Kehr
- 0 Comments
Driving stepper and brushless dc (BLDC) motors can be a control engineering nightmare. These motors are popular for many different kinds of consumer products, meaning cost, size and complexity are all priorities. The traditional process for driving medium...
Teaching Your PI Controller to Behave (Part IV)

Posted 3 months ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 2 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments At the end of my last blog, we discussed the possibility of creating a single parameter that could automatically tune the PI coefficients for a velocity loop used in a motor speed control...
Teaching Your PI Controller to Behave (Part III)

Posted 3 months ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 0 Comments
Dave Wilson , Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments In my last blog, I explained how to calculate the P and I coefficients (actually the Ka and Kb coefficients in a series structure) for a current loop PI controller for a motor. We saw that...
Teaching Your PI Controller to Behave (Part II)

Posted 3 months ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 1 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments In my previous blog on this topic, we briefly reviewed the history of the PI controller and presented two forms that are commonly used today. Regardless of which form you use, the frequency...
Teaching Your PI Controller to Behave (Part I)

Posted 3 months ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 0 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments Richard Poley manages the training activities for our C2000 microcontrollers (MCUs), and co-teaches the TI Industrial Control Seminar series with me. (If you have never attended one of Richard’s...
Engineer It – When to use a pre-driver vs. an integrated motor driver

Posted 6 months ago

by MaryMcAuliffe
- 0 Comments
Do you know? Learn more about the differences between a pre-driver and an integrated motor driver and when to choose one over the other, in this new video from Mike Firth - TI motor drive expert. when to use a pre-driver vs. an integrated motor driver
Having Fun With Motors, The CNC Way

Posted 6 months ago

by Jose Quinones
- 0 Comments
Life is stressful. But compared to boring, I surely prefer the stress. Nonetheless, every now and then I require an activity to recharge my batteries. When I started building my R2D2 replica in 1995, little did I know I would find my piece of mind in...
Power Electronics Hardware in the Loop

Posted 9 months ago

by ChrisClearman
- 2 Comments
The future (and present for many cutting edge users) of power electronics control – and something we at TI are helping to promote – is the expansion of model based development, i.e. simulation and automatic code generation tools. You may already...
Controlling BLDC Motors: Simple is Usually Better

Posted 9 months ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 0 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments I hate tax season! I not only hate the fact that I have to pay the taxes, but also that I must document the process. I’ve noticed over the years that my taxes have become increasingly...
VREF On A Budget

Posted 10 months ago

by Jose Quinones
- 0 Comments
As engineers, if we had an infinite budget, we could create an infinite number of high-quality gadgets. Unfortunately, few of us have access to unlimited resources, so we must use our available assets as purposefully as possible. I was reminded of this...
Social media: Moving engineering forward

Posted 11 months ago

by Jose Quinones
- 0 Comments
I think I was about seven years old when my Mother told me, “Humans are a social species. We need each other to survive!” I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I’m pretty sure she noticed I was having more fun deciphering...
Adding a C to the CLA

Posted over 1 year ago

by ChrisClearman
- 0 Comments
All motor control designers want to deliver the best possible motor control solution quickly. Part of this depends on the gauged difficulty of design. If you’ve investigated TI microcontrollers for your motor control designs, you may have run across...
So, Which PWM Technique is Best (part 7)

Posted over 1 year ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 1 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments So, which PWM technique is best for your motor control application? There are certainly plenty of options to choose from, with each one exhibiting unique advantages as well as disadvantages...
So, Which PWM Technique is Best (part 6)

Posted over 1 year ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 0 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments So, which PWM technique is best for your motor control application? Hopefully by now you have seen just how versatile the PWM process can be, and how subtle changes in this process can have...
So, Which PWM Technique is Best? (part 5)

Posted over 1 year ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 2 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments So, which PWM technique is best for your motor control application? By now you have probably surmised that there is no “one” PWM technique that is the best for all applications...