I am going to implement FPGA based control for advanced motor drives. I am using xilinx kit for that. i do not know anything regarding this. can anyone kindly let me know how to start from the basics?

thank you for the information.

Anand s

 

We seem to be getting a lot of these very ambitious project queries lately. It inspires me to take up brain surgery. Any volunteers?

Regards

cww

 

If by ambitious projects you mean requests out of the blue (from people named very differently from ourselves and most likely residing in China, India, Pakistan, etc.) for complete information on subjects such as DSP motion control, FFT and FPGA but they know nothing at all about the subject by their own admission, the brain surgery patients should be the american corporate executives. For decades the name of the game here in the US was to inflate all HR type requests. I was questioned by a hiring manager once how many years of Pentium board design experience I had the year Pentium had just been released. Salaries inflated accordingly. Politics in the workplace became all important. Now all jobs are migrating to these far away places where people know nothing about anything, and are asking such sweeping questions like tell me all about FPGA because I need to implement a high quality design by tomorrow. These high quality products will be sold tomorrow worldwide and lots of people on this list will be left debugging and maintaining nightmarish systems. Good for corporate America (because they get their multimillion severance) and bad for us. At least they could spend some money to train those people instead of making them beg on free internet lists.

Sorry for the rant,
Matt Tudor, MSEE

 

Hello;

Your question is rather big to answer just like that.

First of all, it depends on what you mean by advanced drives. Is it analog? Digital? Synchronous... You have to be a bit more specific.

However, assuming generalities, I will answer you a bit here...

Obviously the FPGA will deal only with the control section and will simply do what is currently done by DSP. So unless this is an academic exercise or you have some specific reason for using an FPGA, you may want to consider DSP which are plentiful and resonably cheap and give you both analog and digital blogs needed for control applications.

Now back to the FPGA...
The first step will be to sketch a simple design on paper, decide which potions will be handled by fpga, then get your hands onto a simulation and design program. Do some fpga code or if using one of the fancy programs use an fpga block diagrams to create a simple prototype and simulate the design. Once you're at this point, you'll have a better idea about the chip to use and therefore you can complete your design in the EDA program, simulate it and then program the device for testing...

Good luck

Walt Njuh
Akumeka

 

I do like the ones we get like: "I am a doctoral candidate in automation and control systems, can you tell me......light bulb?"

Regards

cww

 

Hello Anand...

this is something we did in the lab at UBC many years ago. You should likely start with the easy pieces. Build yourself a simple quad encoder including some oversompling and error checking etc. After that you need some counters to keep position and likely to add target position, then a simple control filter to operate on position error, then some way of transmitting position increments to the fpga and maybe some buffer storage on board.

If you go into any of the electronic indices you will find our papers in Int.J.Mach Tools and manufacture..a much more recent paper that talks about cross coupled cores and process integation will appear in IEEE/ASME Trans on mechatronics in 2/2005. A small commercial site that shows the structure of the cores is at http://www.cimotion.com