BLDC eval board and driver suggestions wanted

PaulSchoenke

Hello:

We are starting a project with small three phase motors for controlling some mechanical positioning.

This is a brushless DC 3 phase motor (12Vdc 0.56A with hall sensors). We are looking for a way to control position of the motor, (cheap stepper?).

The Ideal thing would be to find an evaluation board or kit that has not only the driver chips but a way to control speed/position. It seems like the driver chip manufacturers have an evaluation board for their chips in many cases, but I would need to supply the control signals. Do you know of any boards that can be controlled via a PC to start working with until we get a chance to work on the embedded solution?

For now this is just R&D... We are looking at some motors for position control. If possible, I'm looking for an interface board I don't have to put a lot of effort into for proof of concept. Some code writing is understandable. We do not do much with Labview interfaces here. Visual Basic interface would be better. We run with VB6 and .net.

Any feedback or input is welcomed and appreciated!

Thanks again!

Paul

over 12 years ago

0 Reagan Revisore over 12 years ago

TI__Expert 4225 points

Paul,

I will look into this further, and get back to you as I gather more. Just to clarify, when you say you're looking for an interface board, are you referring to an already-built board, or a reference design?

Regards,

Reagan

0 Reagan Revisore over 12 years ago in reply to Reagan Revisore

TI__Expert 4225 points

Actually on one note, there is the RDK-Stepper(http://www.ti.com/tool/rdk-stepper) eval kit from Stellaris that you could look into testing with. StellarisWare includes startup code to run the board, and if end up wanting to use LM4F, a lot of the code should transition over pretty easily with the StellarisWare usage. If you're primarily focused on position control, then a stepper motor is probably ideal. A C2000 shouldn't be necessary for a stepper motor like that, only a device with a quadrature encoder interface.

0 PaulSchoenke over 12 years ago in reply to Reagan Revisore

Genius 3290 points

Either one would work right now as it's very early in concept phase, so anything that might work for proof of concept would be good.

Thanks again!

Paul

0 Reagan Revisore over 12 years ago in reply to PaulSchoenke

TI__Expert 4225 points

Paul,

Is the decision set on using brushless DC motors? We can investigate using stepper motors, but it won't make a difference if they're looking at brushless DC. If their key careabout is to have the position control then the brushless DC motors will conflict with this.

-Reagan

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BLDC eval board and driver suggestions wanted