Development Kit Eases Sensorless Motor Control

Feb 26, 2008 11:28 AM

STMicroelectronics has announced a complete three-phase motor-control development kit (the STM3210B-MCKIT) based on its STM32 Flash microcontroller, which provides all the necessary hardware and firmware to enable users to evaluate this 32-bit solution, and to begin development of their own sensorless field-oriented motor-control application. The STM32 uses the ARM Cortex-M3 core, developed to address the requirements of home-appliance and industrial applications.

Device type: three-phase motor-control development kit
Features: applicable for permanent magnet synchronous motors and ac induction motors; operation up to 48 V; schematics to minimize hardware design time; ability to perform real-time control and monitoring via an on-board color LCD and joystick, or standalone operation using on-board push buttons and trimmers; Segger J-Link USB-powered JTAG emulator; Flash programming and real-time debugging capability; debugger and
programmer
Packaging: 22.2 mm (L) x 10 mm (W) x 24 mm (H)
Target applications: washing machines, dishwasher pumps, refrigerators and air conditioners, in the appliance sector; and industrial applications such as electric vehicles, low-end and medium-range industrial drives, office automation, HVAC actuators and fans, and vending and cash machines
Pricing: priced at $1129 including a 24-V dc permanent magnet synchronous motor; an ac induction motor for use with the kit can be ordered separately
Availability: Available now
Documentation? Yes, see www.st.com

Notes: A complete sensorless vector-control algorithm for three-phase brushless PMSM motor is executed in less than 25 µs, using less than 30% of the CPU’s resources for most applications, and leaving plenty of processing power for other application tasks, if required. The code size for the PMSM solution is less than 16 Kbytes.