ARM Community: Making Motor Control Easy with Low Cost, Fully Featured MCU Boards - ARM Community

Motor efficiency continues to increase in importance as governments mandate power reductions. But for many engineers, trying to navigate through the myriad of motor control options, including brushless DC (BLDC), brushless AC (BLAC), stepper, and dual-brushed DC motors can be a daunting task. Many times, microcontroller suppliers offer a dedicated motor control evaluation board that addresses only one of these motor types. This makes it difficult for a customer to compare different motor control options without having to purchase and work with different evaluation boards.

To address this issue and to support fast time-to-market for motor-control applications, NXP offers the low-cost LPCXpresso Motor Control Kit, a universal development platform created in partnership with Embedded Artists. It is an ideal way to prototype a motor-control project or simply explore motor-control functionality. The flexibility of the board allows users to evaluate brushless DC or AC, stepper or even dual-brushed DC motors. The LPCXpresso Motor Control kit also allows engineers to plug in LPC1100 ARM® Cortex™-M0, LPC1300 or LPC1700 Cortex-M3 LPCXpresso boards directly. The kit can also be adapted to support virtually any of NXP ARM Cortex-M4, ARM7 or ARM9 processor-based microcontrollers enabling engineers to move up/down the line of products to find the best fit for the target application needs.

The main board has two full H-bridges, so up to four phases can be controlled with up to 100% duty cycle. Phase voltage, as well as in-phase current can be measured on three phases, and virtual ground voltage and common low-side current can be measured, too. For safety and protection, there is an input over-current trip protection. For design flexibility, there are several communications interfaces, including USB, Ethernet, CAN, RS-422/485, and a UART-to-USB bridge. The board also has a small graphic user interface (96x64 pixel OLED) with a joystick, to allow for simple, intuitive human interaction.

The kit also includes a BLDC motor with hall sensors, a 24V power supply (60W) and access to the free Eclipse-based LPCXpresso IDE with GCC compiler.



I think our customers will appreciate the ability to quickly get a Cortex-M0 processor-based brushless DC motor application running within a few minutes and then be able to switch to a Cortex-M3 processor-based sensorless motor control with the same basic hardware.

The kit is available through NXP's distribution partners. More information can be found at EmbeddedArtists.com.

Guest Partner Blogger:
Gene Carter, International Product Marketing Manager, NXP Semiconductors. Gene has over 17 years experience in the semiconductors industry. He holds a BSEE from Tufts University and an MBA from USC’s Marshall School of Business.

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