Motor Drive & Control Blog

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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...
Power Electronics Hardware in the Loop

Posted 8 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...
Teaching Your PI Controller to Behave (Part V)

Posted 1 month 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;...
Teaching Your PI Controller to Behave (Part X)

Posted 6 days 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 – When to use a pre-driver vs. an integrated motor driver

Posted 5 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
Teaching Your PI Controller to Behave (Part IX)

Posted 21 days 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...
Teaching Your PI Controller to Behave (Part II)

Posted 2 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...
SR Motors...Sinking Relevance or Suddenly Respectable?

Posted over 1 year ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 1 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments So what's going on with the Switched Reluctance motor? Everywhere I go, I see engineers huddled together in dark corners at parties or sporting events, speaking in hushed whispers, asking this...
The Ten Commandments of Digital Control (part 1)

Posted over 1 year ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 1 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments Despite the fact that I now work for the Microcontroller Division of Texas Instruments; deep down, I still consider myself to be an analog engineer. I must confess that I didn’t always...
The Ten Commandments of Digital Control (Part 2)

Posted over 1 year ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 0 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments This week, we are counting down to the number one commandment of digital control. Yesterday I discussed more generic issues related to simulation and code generation. But today I want to...
The Ten Commandments of Digital Control (Part 3)

Posted over 1 year ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 0 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments We are now halfway through our countdown of the “Ten Commandments of Digital Control”. Yesterday we discussed the Analog-to-Digital Converter, and more specifically, the timing...
The Ten Commandments of Digital Control (Part 4)

Posted over 1 year ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 0 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments This week we are counting down the Ten Commandments of Digital Control, and we are only one day away from the NUMBER ONE Commandment. Before discussing today’s Commandments, Let’s...
The Ten Commandments of Digital Control (Part 5)

Posted over 1 year ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 0 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments For those of you just joining our discussion, we have been counting down the “Ten Commandments of Digital Control” all this week, leading up to the number one commandment today...
The 5.2V Stepper Motor and 50V Stepper Driver Paradox

Posted over 1 year ago

by Jose Quinones
- 0 Comments
I find it funny that a lot of stepper motors out there are still rated in voltage and that their voltage ratings are frequently low. This can cause confusion for some of our customers wanting to drive a 3V, 5.2V or 6V stepper motor with one of our 40V...
Electric Power Steering Turns the Corner

Posted over 1 year ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 0 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments Did you know that your hydraulic steering system wastes more energy than any other system in your car and is third highest in total vehicular energy losses (right behind wind resistance...
So, Which PWM Technique is Best? (Part 1)

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? In case you haven’t guessed, this is somewhat of a trick question. It’s kind of like asking “which ice...
So, Which PWM Technique is Best? (part 2)

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? In the previous blog, we examined the single-quadrant PWM technique, which is a good fit for extremely cost sensitive...
So, Which PWM Technique is Best? (part 3)

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? So far we have studied two motor drive topologies that result in unipolar PWM voltage waveforms on the motor, but are...
So, Which PWM Technique is Best? (part 4)

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? Up to now we have investigated three different PWM techniques. Some could regenerate energy back into the DC power supply...
In the Event of an Actual Emergency...

Posted over 1 year ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 0 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments Earlier this week, the federal government flexed its muscles and assumed control of all of the broadcast media in the United States. It was the most expansive test ever of the Federal Emergency...
"Because the Computer Said So..."

Posted over 1 year ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 0 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments Over the course of my 32 year career, I have seen the personal computer evolve from a Commodore VIC-20, to the dual core mobile workstation I am writing this blog with. From 1980 until now...
At Last...Remote Debugging is HERE!

Posted over 1 year ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 0 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments When I was a young engineer, I was involved in a pretty ugly incident with a three-phase power inverter. No, I didn't get hurt, but the incident shook me up a little. I had designed a three...
Using Ice-Cream Cones to make Sine Waves

Posted over 1 year ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 0 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments I'm writing this blog the day after a very satisfying Thanksgiving holiday, and I still have food on my mind. So what does food have to do with motor control? Well, let me show you how to make...
The Most AWESOME Motors in the Whole World!

Posted over 1 year ago

by Dave (Wisconsin) Wilson
- 0 Comments
Dave Wilson, Motion Products Evangelist, Texas Instruments Next to the wheel, the electric motor is arguably the most significant object ever invented by man. Just try to find any other invention that affects our lives as much as the electric motor...
Microstepping Resolution vs. Microstepping Accuracy…Clearing Up the Confusion

Posted over 1 year ago

by Jose Quinones
- 0 Comments
Jose Quinones, (Analog Motor Drives - Applications Engineer) My favorite motor has always been the stepper motor. It does not matter if it is bipolar or unipolar. It does not matter if it is permanent magnet, variable reluctance or hybrid. Either way...