Possibly the future in motion controllers?

[tronicgr]

I was looking around for modern microcontroller solutions and couldn't help noticing all these new cheap Cortex M3 development boards arising.

They are totally different from AVR family but I could give it a try for an ultra fast motion controller with 4 or more axis. In the next link this one even has 3.2 inch touch LCD screen among other connectivity addons:

Open107V ARM Cortex-M3 USB STM32F107VCT6 MCU Development Board Kit

And a cheap programmer/debugging interface for it:
J-Link V8 ARM USB-JTAG Adapter Emulator - Black






So if anyone is open for donation for one of these please let me know. It could really change everything we thought about motion simulator electronics.

Best Regards,
Thanos


EDIT: Here are some specifications of this microcontroller:

STM32F107VCT6: ARM Cortex-M3 32-bit RISC
- Operating frequency: 72MHz, 1.25 DMIPS/MHz
- I/Os: 80
- Memories: 256K Flash, 64K RAM
- Communication Interfaces: 3 x SPI, 3 x USART, 2 x UART, 2 x I2S, 2 x I2C, 1 x Ethernet MAC, 1 x USB OTG, 2 x CAN
- AD & DA converters: 2 x AD (12-bit, 1us, shares 16 channels); 2 x DA (12-bit)


How to donate for this development board:
If you like to donate for this purpose please go to my blog and click on the paypal donation button on the top right side of the page:
http://motionsim.blogspot.com/



I have no other way of placing donation button for it here as paypal requires special html code for link protection.
If donations for this development board doesn't reach its target within two months, I'll reverse all donations about it.
Keep in mind that donations are subject to 4.6% fees going to paypal for the service (for example: from $10 donation, I get only $9.54)
List of the participant names can be place here (unless instructed otherwise) along with the percent of collected funds toward target.

Thanks


Project donation target: $97

Donation amount so far: $150

List of donors:
- Terry F. (telfel)
- David L. (motiondave)
- Richard D. (riton)
- Jakub V. (mambo)
- Gilles C. (vicpopo)
- John T. (John)
- Mirco L. (yokoyoko)

The Open107v Motion Controller Project thread is now can be found here: http://www.x-sim.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=359

[motiondave]

ok both parts are about $100 , so what are your intentions?
Granted you want to test it, but what and how? Do you have a plan for it?
Can you give us some more info about how it should work?
Is there an existing code that may work with x-sim?

I will donate a PART payment. Maybe 1/5.

[Roadster2]

Hi Thanos. Sounds very interesting. Would one of these boards drive four motors (3 DOF), using two of the Chinese Dual Motor Driver boards ??

If we can get a few people together then I'm up for chipping in.

[ferslash]

Thanos


i think that a lot of us would give a small pice of the money needed... just tell us what do you expect from this cards and why are they that grate... i mean in order to put some "sugar" to the donation intentions of the community.

best regards from mx

fer

[Riton]

I am also interested, I will also make a small contribution to help.

management of 3 / 4 and 6 AC motors interests me.

in the future i will make a 3 dof like Force dynamics
and maybe a 6DOF
DC motors too .

[sirnoname]

Hi,

I did not get the difference between the controllers, such cpu boards looks very same to me.
The pololu have no big processor, the SCN5 does not have high speed cpus.
Is it not better to port your code as a loadable firmware to a arduino xy?
The chips are the same type, the development IDE is the same, you have a USB interface (RS232 converter) and they can be bought from everywhere for nearly nothing:
http://www.ebay.de/itm/ATmega2560-16AU- ... 3cc9850039
You can connect more than one for more axis.

regards,
SirNoName

[Riton]

I have on Mega2560 at home, i think it's a good card.
I try to learn to program with this card.

[tronicgr]

I too have arduino Mega2560 at home, but I never found it useful. The fixed speed crystal at 16Mhz makes it unusable for accurate serial communications. Serial communications need a certain speed division for the cpu cycles to synchronize for uart polling. Also the lack of any on-board buttons or peripherals makes it necessary to use shield for interfacing to the outside world. Maybe create a arduino shield then? I Will think of this possibility and how and if can be done. Also it might be difficult to find a proper loader on PC side that works with the Arduino bootloader correctly. It might need external programmer as well.

I'd might suggest instead this board that is chip compatible with atmega644 and you can "change" the crystal to uart compatible ones:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/STK16-Premium-MCU-AVR-mega16-ATmega16A-ATmega16-32-8535-IC-Development-Board-/260911401983?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3cbf880bff
or this that is more slim:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/ATmega16A-PU-ATmega16-mega16-AVR-Development-Board-Starter-Kit-Full-I-O-Expander-/250949051253?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3a6dbaa375
But then you have to hardwire all peripherals your self.

Back to topic:

The difference between AVR and ARM Cortex is that Cortex its a microcontroller with different architecture and fully 32-bit, Single-cycle multiplication and hardware division. Also its very suitable for motor control as it has lots of hardware features for this reason:

-80 I/Os, all mappable on 16 external interrupt vectors and almost all 5 V-tolerant
-Up to 10 timers with pinout remap capability
-Up to four 16-bit timers, each with up to 4 IC/OC/PWM or pulse counter and quadrature (incremental) encoder input
-1 × 16-bit motor control PWM timer with dead-time generation and emergency stop
-2 × watchdog timers (Independent and Window)
-SysTick timer: a 24-bit downcounter
-2 × 16-bit basic timers to drive the DAC
-2 × CAN interfaces (2.0B Active) with 512 bytes of dedicated SRAM
-USB 2.0 full-speed device/host/OTG controller with on-chip PHY that supports HNP/SRP/ID with 1.25 Kbytes of dedicated SRAM
-10/100 Ethernet MAC with dedicated DMA and SRAM (4 Kbytes)

Also it has the processing power to handle complicate graphics on its touch LCD screen for GUI or just display RPM/SPEED/GEAR/TEMP gauges along while its driving the motors.

Open-ucosii-1.jpg (138.12 KiB) Viewed 8581 times

Lots of new sensors that arising these days are working at 3.3v and I'm talking about accelerometers/gyroscopes and magnetic compasses that could replace potentiometers for motor position feedback.

Not to mention that most Android cellphones run on similar ARM microcontrollers...

It's just a technology that was never before easily accessible in cheap development board like this. Its more an opportunity to step forward into something better, a new standard.

Well the amount for it is not huge, donations for purchasing SNC5 was done before too, that was 5 times more expensive, but needed for Sirnoname to actually have one on his hands to program an interface plugin for it. Even I donated some for that and I will never use SCN5 anyways...


Best Regards,
Thanos

[tronicgr]

Like you said, they run with it, asking for 1000 pieces of hardware...

The hardware is already there, you can buy just one for your self and then load a firmware on it and use it. No one asked for mass production.

And for comparison, did I asked anything back for the AMC1.6 firmware? Didn't implemented new features in it as requested? And still provide support for it for free?

Of course there will be a firmware available for the "Open107V ARM Cortex-M3 USB STM32F107VCT6 MCU Development Board Kit" as well portable to other similar Cortex boards.

Actually it would be easier for me to port my existing code pieces to a AVR development board like this:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Xmega-ATXmega-ATxmega128A1-AVR-Development-Board-/250814174298?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3a65b0945a
But then, look at the price for what it offers with it...


uC: ATxmega128A1
Flash (Kbytes): 128 Kbytes
Pin Count: 100
Max. Operating Frequency: 32 MHz
CPU: 8-bit AVR
# of Touch Channels: 16
Hardware QTouch Acquisition: No
Max I/O Pins: 78
Ext Interrupts: 78
USB Speed: No
USB Interface: No


Thanos

[Riton]

your card : http://dx.com/p/open107v-arm-cortex-m3- ... kit-150519
is not very expensive , i think it's correct for a simulator card.
i can help you if you thik is a better solution , you are the boss!!