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Kit will help to develop drives and motor controls
Published:  14 May, 2015

Texas Instruments (TI) has announced a hardware and software kit that it says will make it easier to develop and evaluate drives for a variety of motor types, sensing technologies, encoder standards and communications networks. The DesignDrive kit can also be used to develop real-time Ethernet communications and functional safety topologies.

The kit, based on the real-time control architecture of TI's C2000 microcontrollers (MCUs), can be used to develop industrial inverter and servodrives for applications such as robotics, CNC machines, elevators and materials-handling systems.

The kit, which plugs into 110V/220V AC supplies, includes a power stage that can deliver up to 8A to drive three-phase motors. The MCU can be placed on either side of the high-voltage isolation barrier.

Built-in sensing peripherals include eight sigma-delta filters and four 16-bit ADCs. For position feedback, the kit supports interfacing with resolvers and incremental encoders.

TI's kit will make it easier to develop a wide range of motor controls

The DesignDrive software is supported by TI’s C2000 controlSuite package and includes examples of vector control of motors, incorporating current, speed and position loops. The kit will serve as a platform for future drives projects from TI based on new releases of controlSuite. It comes with TI's Code Composer Studio development environment, which provides code generation and debugging capabilities.

The kit is available either with a high-voltage permanent magnet synchronous motor and encoder for $1,199, or without a motor for $999.