I work for Texas Instruments since 2013 and throughout my career I was doing customer support for our motor control products so I wanted to share some of my experience and insights in the solution offerings of TI.
If you look at the TI motor control portfolio from a system perspective then you can separate them into two categories. There are very sophisticated solutions which target customers for servo drives or other industrial machines. Those solutions provide only the framework of the hardware and software to enable the customers to flexibly design their own solutions and ideas. Latest released hardware for this is the DesignDrive IDDK:
The other category, which I want to spend more time on, is the ecosystem around the InstaSpin software. You can understand this ecosystem as "three phase motor control solution with built in expertise”. It is targeted to offer customers the possibility to spin their motor within just a few minutes of setup time. That sounds like a marketing promise but in a big number of cases this is true. For me it became a personal concern to work with this software because of the combination of performance and ease of use. And due to this I also got a number of very positive feedback from customers. Actually it’s fun to work with
So what is included in InstaSpin?
Very briefly; we are offering the entire software framework, including current and speed loop, with additional features (like Rs recalculation, field weakening, motor identification….and many more). Special part of the software is our software encoder (FAST) which is built on a unique algorithm and can clearly differentiate from competing solution in terms of performance.
A broad range of EVMs and test boards is directly supported in the software. So if you start testing with a TI EVM then there are no software configurations necessary.
What can I do with it?
You can run all types of three phase motors BLDC, PMSM, IPM, MPM or even ACIM.
You can get started quickly, run the machines efficiently and with high performance without having a PhD in control theory.
The Idea of this blog is not only to show how to use this “tool” the best way but also to show where you can hit its limitations.
I plan to go deep dive into some of the topics in future blog posts which I just mentioned here.
Please give me a “thumbs up” if this has already triggered your interest or leave a comment. Cheers!