All about Motion and Motor Control
With ADI Trinamic We live in a highly automated world. Every time you pull money from an ATM,
every time you go through airport security and every time your blood is analyzed, small electric motors are involved.
Statistics say that there are more electric motors added to this world every year,
than there is human population. Statistics
also say that about half of the world's electricity consumption
each year is because of electric motors. Imagine you would be holding in your hand
one of those motors. And imagine
the motors are surrounding you. Imagine if we would be able
to reduce the power consumption of small electric motors
significantly, and if we could reduce the noise level
to those motors and the stress level to the people because we reduced the motor
noise, the audible noise. That's part of the vision of ADI Trinamic
for the last decades and I've been part of this vision
for the last 15 years. My name is Tobias Wendlandt
and I'm director of ADI Trinamic. What will I learn today? As I said before, there is about more motors in this world than there is
humans. Motors are different. So there's large motors.
There are small motors. There's a variety of different names
for motors. What sizes and what power? What power input, what power output? Today we're going to talk about motor
and motion control, specifically on fractional horse power motors like this. So this can be stepper motors, brushless DC motors and brush DC motors. And today we're going to talk about how the energy consumption will be reduced,
for example, to this specific part by about 75% under certain circumstances. And we will talk about other solutions that are available to you when you go through
motor control and motion control. We will also learn about the differentiations between motion control and motor control, and we will learn about
how we can help you to accelerate your design cycles
for motor and motion control applications. Let me speak about the difference
between motor and motion control. This is a motor. This has some magnets inside. It has some coils, and obviously there will be a voltage
and there will be a current. So the motor will be turning. There will be speed and velocity, and
there will be also position accelerations. If you think about supplying
a current to the coils, the motor will start to rotate. You would call everything
that is like how you operate the motor, supplying current to the motor coils,
turning the motor that will be in motor control.
On the other hand, motion control, if there's a piece coming to it
like acceleration and positioning of the motor,
you will find that there will be specific profiles
that you need to take into account kind of acceleration
profiles, positioning algorithms. So this would be considered
motion control, the characteristics of motor control, or current and speed, so it's turning and voltage
that's part of the motor control. Part of the motion control
would be the acceleration and the deceleration
and the motion profile. Where will you find electric motors? So why is there so many motors
in the world? Actually, everything around us
is highly automated, as I said. So if you go through airport security,
but also if you like, get your eye inspection for your glasses,
for new glasses, your medication, motors are involved. Also in a lot of foundries,
motors are involved. So there is
there's a lot of automation around us and there is a need to improve
and to accelerate, also, automation in the world. How can we make motor control better? Today it's possible with the way of motion
and motor control at the edge that we have been accelerating
over the last decades that were not possible
in the last about three years ago. So if you think about, for example,
if malaria testers or if you think about COVID PCR testers, the way of automation
allowed to create a lot of new devices in a very short period
because you have the automation ready as a building block
and with like a motor, I'll come to that a little later,
but a stepper motor would do steps. So today, the way we control it
and how we accelerated the evolution of electric motors
and the motor and motion control, how we control it today
allows to make much more precise movements and a much smoother movement
and a much more silent movement of the of the operation. Also, in terms of bulky motors, you might think of big ones that do not fit in some wearable devices or in anything that's battery powered. If you think about cameras
or small little door cameras or if you think about other devices
that you would carry with you as insulin pumps,
for example, or drug dispensing, it will not work with something
that is not highly miniaturized
and highly integrated to those motors and would allow
to miniaturize the full setup. And again,
if you think about the efficiency of the electric motors, if we can help
to increase those with the building blocks that we're using, you could increase
the runtime of your device that's battery powered. What problems do ADI Trinamic solve? At ADI Trinamic we had a vision or have a vision to
improve the performance of electric motors and to enable new applications
and to improve motor and motion control. So, we were facing our customers limitations and challenges
in terms of miniaturization, in terms of precise positioning,
in terms of audible noise and our mission is to bring
that to a ready to use building blocks to help our customers accelerating their designs,
using those proven building blocks and improve their application
by using the technology that we offer on an IC level as well as what we
what I'll show you a little later as well, is what we call also
the solutions products on a board level. Who are ADI Trinamic? At ADI Trinamic we believe that motion control should be precise and dependable, reliable and efficient. This is why we integrate our algorithms
and digital portions into our integrated circuits, into our board level products,
and into our mechatronic solutions. How can ADI Trinamic help me in my application? At ADI Trinamic we help our customers to actually close the bridge between a microprocessor and the motor leads. This can be a single chip or a chipset, but it can also be what we call board
level products, ready to use turnkey solutions that could, for example, mount
to the back side of the motors. We also have off the shelf products like this multi axis
motor control and motion control board. And we also have this what we call PANdrive™ drive mechatronics
that already include the motor control and motion control boards on the back
side of the motor and enclosed with a with a connector
on the top of the housing. So this for example, comes
with an interface, an IO link interface, and this is also available off the shelf. In addition to that, we have a new series of products,
what we call a motion cookie. So the motion cookie is actually something
between a full-blown board level product that's coming with the connectors
on the board. But it is, as you can see here, it's completely without the connectors,
but it's solderable to your main PCB and use the functionality
of a full-blown board without the connectors,
making it efficient and making it helping you to accelerate the design What are common fractional
horse power motor types? Today, we will be mainly focusing on steppermotors and brushless DC motors. And I brought a little demo here,
which is pretty much the most simple stepper motor
you can imagine. It has a coil pair
that those are connected and those are connected. So you will have four motor leads here. And the way you supply the current,
how you turn them on and off makes the magnetic rotor
in the middle, rotate depending on how
the current is supplied to the motor coils. So you can imagine turning them on and off
how this rotor in the middle actually steps
through the magnetic field or the magnetic fields
that the coils create or generate. And this is very similar approach. This would be more phases,
but actually it's a brushless DC motor
but a very similar concept. How do motor control and motion control differ? The stepper motor,
because of its characteristics, having a high torque output at lower
speeds, you could actually use this as a as a direct drive without a gearbox. In many cases, brushless DC motor
is used for higher speed applications where you need some dynamics hydrodynamics
there might or might not be a gearbox actually attached to it. But it's it's a different field
where you need a profile torque profile,
whether the motor has to come to a certain speed before it actually
reaches its high as torque output. Typically the stepper motors
is more an open loop approach, so you might not necessarily
need an encoder for communication. It can be sensorless and I'll show
you more about that a little later. The brushless DC typically has a sensor
attached to it, so here it's Hall sensors, or it could be an encoder depending on the requirements
and the resolution. So typically it's sensor
based computation for a brushless DC
and but could also be sensorless. So actually we're turning the motors and obviously
we want to learn something from the edge. So on the motor
side, we're using actual motor drivers to control and drive the current
of the motor coils that you saw here. But on the other hand,
we need to have a digital portion and to make a
node like an actuator, a smart actuator. We're connecting the digital world
to the analog world. So we are kind of enabling
the analog piece with the digital addition of building blocks. So the digital on the digital side,
I'll come to a few more of the algorithms a little later,
but they have a high level interface so they can use
I2C or SPI interface. The digital piece connects
talks to the microcontroller on the board through a
serial interface could be an SPI interface or UART interface or any other. How do I simplify my smart actuator design?
Okay. So we were talking about motor
and motion control and actually that kind of is the difference. So we kind of connect the digital world
to the analog world and you can interface it
through SPI or I2C and actually learn more about the current situation,
react to the situation and make it a smart node,
a smart actuator, actually. As you can imagine, controlling
and driving those motors, like having a motion control requirement, you need to react to the current situation and you need to change
parameters on the fly. If you are facing a motor
and motion control application and you want to get into the design
and you start with your own design, developing your own electronics,
we're actually, as I said earlier, helping to close the bridge between
the microprocessor and the motor leads. So actually
we offer a high level interface like, for example, an SPI or I2C or UART
to your microprocessor. But we also offload some real time
critical portion from your software, the motion control piece, and add that as a digital portion, as a digital proven
building block to the analog side. So actually you control
you only set the registers to your motion control rather than having to do that
in your own software. So it's a ready to use block that you can
immediately access to the serial interface and to control and drive the motor. Besides the chips and chipsets, you could
also get this as a full solution, integrating the microcontroller
on the board already having here is, for example,
a high level interface like USB. It could also be a zero interface
like R45 for example. You could attach it
to the back side of your motor to connect your motor leadsand immediately run the motors. So this is a full-blown solution
and this is the chipset. So we will go a little bit
more in the details shortly, how we address the typical challenges
that a motion control application might come with, increasing the accuracy,
increasing the resolution, addressing the audible noise
and making the motors more efficient. Now we have been talking about
a little bit of the basics. With the next piece,
we will go further into the details and we'll visualize and demo
some of the functionalities and features that can help you to improveand accelerate your motor and motion control application. Reducing cost and increasing efficiency
with StallGuard™ and CoolStep™ Let's get into it! Before we dive into the details,
let me shortly explain what we see here. So this is actually a stepper motor on this side connected to the motor
leads to our EV kit system, so our evaluation board system.
The EV kit is connected to power and it's connected to the laptop here and uses some software to control
and visualize what I'm doing here. So this is actually sensorless, so there is no sensor attached. open loop stepper with EV kit, EV kit is set up
as a micro control board microcontroller that does the communication
here, interfacing. It talks through SPI
to what we call a C driver, so actually a controller driver
that integrates the motion control piece, the driver stage
and the MOSFETS into one single package. And you see the bridge
where you can sense the signals that are interchanged through the SPI
and other segments of this setup. What you see here is actually
a visualization of the load angle. What is the load angle? So as I explained before with my demo
here, the stepper motor, right? So there is the electrical field
that rotates through the motor coils and the magnetic rotor
that follows this field In an unloaded condition the angle is very small. You see that
as indicated as a small angle. If I start to load that motor shaft, you see how that angle spreads up. When the load angle spreads up to 90 degrees,
you start to lose position information. So you start to lose steps. This is a critical point
in an open loop system without a sensor. So actually we developed the technology and implemented it to the products,
what we call StallGuard. So what you see here is when the motor is turning,
when the rotor is turning through the coils, it's
actually generating a back voltage. We have a potential technology,
the StallGuard, how we sense the back voltage of the motor, which allows us, even without a sensor, to have a visualization or an information
about the current situation of the load conditions of the load angle.
This information and open loop system store that allows us two different things
and I'll come to them in a minute. Let me come to the first point of my talk
that I brought up earlier. Stepper
motors are not known to be very efficient, so the conventional way, operating a stepper
motor, is you supply a current
with a constant amplitude to the motor coils,
no matter what the load conditions are. So if the motors unload it, you won't need all the power
that the motor potentially has. So you're actually burning the energy,
you're heating up the motor, you're wasting the energy.
On this side here you see the 100% is representing the nominal current
that's going to this motor. Here it is. I think about 1.1 amp
that's going to the motor coil, an amplitude of 1.1 amp. And when I turn on what we call
CoolStep and this is based on the load
angle information we got from StallGuard, we can actually sense the conditions
as long as we know that the motor is not heavily loaded, we can reduce the current
that's going to the motor. So actually we make
that an efficient system because we can reduce the motor current
to 25% instead of the 100% nominal current because we know the motor is unloaded. So now when you start to load
the motor shaft again and you see that on the load angle here, it's increasing. And you also see that the current is
adjusted according to the load conditions. That allows to make it
a much more efficient system and not to burn the energy. So actually the motor stays cool. That's what we call a CoolStep
and it makes it much more efficient according to your application,
according to your load conditions. What we're seeing here
is a graphical visualization here. So actually one curve is representing
the current that goes to the motors,
and the other one is the load angle. So as long as you have your load angle in a certain level, you might or might
not increase the current. So you see how the current actually when I turn the CoolStep on how the current reduces,
if it's unloaded and starts to increase, if I start to load the motor shaft.
There are different thresholds that you can set. There are different steps of how quickly
you increase or decrease the current. So that's up to your application. That's the efficient piece on
the StallGuard and the CoolStep. So another functionality of the
StallGuard allows us to actually utilize the load angle information
that we have to save costs in your system, when you think about
finding reference points. So instead of with a conventional way
of driving against the sensor and finding a reference
position, we can utilize the StallGuard information to actually see
when the load angle changes, I explained that before. So envision
a mechanical hard stop in the end, the conventional way
you would have a sensor detecting your moving into that position. With this technology,
with the StallGuard technology, you can actually use the StallGuard
to sense the mechanical hard stop
without a sensor attached to it. So what it actually does
is, I start to load the motor shaft, it's increasing close to 90 degrees before
I start to lose position information. I detect it as a hard stop and it helps me
to find my reference point. So we addressed more diagnostics. We addressed efficiency. And now let's come to another piece, which is the resolution and precision
of the motion control system. So this as a stepper motor, I'm
very sure you can clearly hear the step doing it steps. What you're hearing here is a very or fairly
old way of controlling the stepper. It's a full step operation. You might not only hear it,
but you might also see that it's doing those 1.8 degrees steps with each update of the position. So the resolution here is 1.8 degrees
that makes the system loud and vibrating and unprecise. To get higher accuracy, it started that you divide a full step
position into a micro step position. So actually we can turn this into a 16x microstepping operation So, I can feel it. You will hear it and you might see it
that it's a much smoother movement. So that gives you a lot more accuracy
in your positioning and less audible noise, less vibrations. That's a big improvement already. We were the world's first, that were showing high resolution
micro stepping. There's this 16 X. Today this is pretty much industry
standard, not enough for us and for our customers
and for the application of our customers. So we can go to 256 X micro stepping. I can feel it,
you might hear it and you will see it. It's much smoother movement. And if you think about a camera
application, for example, we have a movement
going through those three stages, high resolution, micro stepping of 16 X,
which is common standard today
for the very smooth 256 times equidistant micro steps
electrically equidistant micro steps that you can drive through
with a very smooth movement with a camera. This is high resolution
micro stepping 256 X, very precise. Now let's switch back to the industry standard today of 16 X. You still hear the noise of the 16 X
and you might still hear a little noise if I turn on to the 256 X resolution. So now for the application
of our customers, customers got back and asked us,
Can you improve that? Can you reduce the noise even more? Yes, we can. This is what we call stealth chop. So let's turn on stealth chop and you still see the motor turning. And I can tell you
I've been presenting this in the field and, actually, I was holding
that to the customer's ears and they were listening to it. I switched on the 16 X micro stepping
resolution and they could clearly hear it,
and I turned on the stealth chop. So they did like this, and the first thing they did is they were looking at the motor
if it's still turning. So it's actually so quiet
that you won't even realize with your ear if the motor is still turning.
That makes the motor much more silent. That's what stealth chop is. Not only that we can improve the silence
of the motor and reduce the stress in the human environment
where there are motors, the stealth chop also
and the high resolution micro stepping
also helps to stabilize the system because from a lower resolution you will see and hear and you saw it
and I felt it, that there are vibrations in the system. So the high resolution micro stepping
as well as the stealth chop help to reduce the audible
as well as vibration, the auto noise, as well as the vibrations in the system
that makes it much more stable. Why a dedicated motion controller? So the conventional way of driving
the motor is that you would create a step pulse from your software through the driver, which is kind of a lot of work to do and it has some real time
critical requirements and so on. So that's a significant piece
and solid to do in software. So actually we encapsulated
and offloaded that from the software and built that into the motion
controller on this IC. Now that we covered all this,
I actually really need a beer. ADI Trinamic’s ramping profiles? Ramping and the motion control application is important and how dedicated building blocks can help you to accelerate and decelerate
and important goods in this beer accelerator demo we avoided and it's going to be safe so you can handle it carefully. What you see here is two sliders,
two beers, both driven by stepper motors. One is utilizing an integrated ramp profile, segmented ramps from Trinamic. The other one is using
the conventional linear acceleration. Before we go into the ramping, I want to just go back to the story
that we told before. So when I turn this on, there's no sensors
in the end or in the beginning it'll automatically reference
on the startup functionality. You'll see that in a
minute. Let me turn this on. Both motors start to turn and move the beer into a mechanical hard stop on this side and into a mechanical hard
stop on the other side to find the reference point
without a sensor. Zero position found. Now you see the beer accelerator
in action. On the one hand, you see that the beer on this side stays very solid. It doesn't move much. That is the higher advanced segmented ramp motion controller ramp built into the motion controller. On this side, you see the conventional way
and you see how the beer is actually shaking. You see it again. Utilizing built in motion control and built in ramp generators and a dedicated piece and a proven building block
coming with a chipset from ADI Trinamic allows you to transport your important goods
like this rather than this. So some of you might say, hey, there's less beer on this side
rather than here. So that creates the effect. So let me swap the glasses and start it again. Finding the reference position on the side for both axes, Finding the reference point
without the sensors on that side, without sensors. And you should see that it's
now slopping on this side more than it does on that side,
even though I swapped the glasses. All right. I think that proved it right. And let me do this, now it's over. Thank you. Cheers. How do I get started? Back to our vision of improving the energy consumption
on the planet and addressing the sustainability,
which is important for us as Analog Devices
and ADI Trinamic. And you want to start
with some of the functionality to improve the efficiency
in your motorized automated application. You might ask yourself,
How do I get started? Right? So depending on if you start with your own design
or if you want to try something out of the box,
you have different options. You could either start with a chip
at a chipset, to evaluate and that's actually an EV kit
that you would get started with. So those whiteboards
are evaluation boards that you could evaluate the functionality, the benefits that come with it
to solve the problems in your application, to address the challenges
that you have in your application. You might also want to go with a ready
to use turnkey solution as a board level product to control
and drive your motors. Or even a multi axis solution
to control a bunch of different motors in a coordinated move. Or you might want to go with a full-blown
mechatronic solution, as in a PANdrive™ where the motor comeswith the electronics, the motor control and motion
control electronics and an interface. No matter what you start with
and no matter what you want to evaluate, there is one software that helps it
to work with all of those products. No matter what you start with or what
you end up with. One software, intuitive software tool,
it has some job wheels and some simplified,
but also like very deep, if you want to dive deeper,
registered settings. So we found that
it was depending on the application and how much effort you want to put into
designing your own electronics or going with something off the shelf
that you can then build into your device or your machine. We had feedback from the field
that requested that something that kind of behaves as a full-blown pull off product
with a software comment on it, having some kind of functionality
built in high-level interface, but kind of behaving as a chip or chipset. So we came up with the idea
of what we call a motion cookie. So a motion cookie actually is more than just a chip. It is a full solution and there's a functionality of a board. So actually if I would just
add connectors to it, it would behave like a board level part which we just did here. So we have the EV kit. There's not much circuitry around it. Mainly connectors. You can take this motion
cookie and solder it to your own PCB one or multiple of them. This can be handled as a chip, so it can be automatically pick
and place inside of your PCB. From open-loop over closed-loop to field-oriented control I've been asked a few times
about closed loop operations, so I would say there's not necessarily a complete definition of what is closed
loop, just saying that something is closed. All right. So I want to address that real quick
and also talk about the differences between open loop and closed
loop real quick. And what I understand under closed loop operation
and the different stages of it. So here we have a stepper motor, we can run this
stepper motor with a motor control board, just attach it, bring it up and run it. Without a sensor,
that's an open loop system. The most efficient way,
the very most efficient way to run a motor
is in a field-oriented control way. So there's ready to use building blocks
to do that with the ADI Trinamic portfolio
on steppers or brushless DC motors. And here is an example for this. And when I was saying
the most efficient way, I wanted to show here on the scope,
you see the current that actually goes
to the motor coils. The motor current is adjusted to the load conditionsbased on the sensored feedback. So in the end of the motor
there is a sensor, an encoder, high resolution encoder
that tells about the load conditions involving a sensor. Here it is an optical sensor. Now the motor encoder detects that there
is no load on the motor shaft right now. So now if I start to load that,
it'll change the current to what is needed to handle that
load conditions right now. So what you will see on the scope
is that the motor current is going to be increased
to the current load conditions. This is the very most efficient way of operating a motor. Nevertheless, not in all applications you can use an encoder
or you cannot afford an encoder. This is why with ADI Trinamic
allow you to use some of the functionality
that behaves similar to an encoder. But without these sensors. So this is a closed loop, but this is a field oriented
controlled closed loop. So we're controlling the current, we’re
controlling the speed, we're controlling the position. On the other side, open loop, no sensor. So in between there is another approach,
what we call sensor step. So actually,
rather than having a fully field oriented control, we add a little button
magnet to the rear side of the motor shaft or actually also
it could be also an optical encoder. Here we would add a magnetic sensor
to the back side of the motor. We can run this motor in a closed
loop operation, even though it's not field oriented control, but it's monitoring
the position information. So actually we can. if we lost steps,
we just do a few more to cover up with the last step lost, to the position last. That's monitoring the position. That's in between a full field
oriented controlled closed loop system, closed loop system, what we call
sensor step based on magnetic encoders, for example, and an open loop system
without any sensors attached. Now, again,
in between that there is the sensorless when we implement the CoolStep,
the StallGuard that allows you some of the functionality
that you get with an encoder or with a sensor, but without the
additional cost of a sensor. I would last that if you need it, you can have it
and you can have the field already controlled coming with
one of the integrated circuits onboard. So with ADI Trinamic portfolio
we cover from the open loop up to the field oriented control
all of our variants with the StallGuard and the CoolStep in the middle as sensorless
plus the magnetic encoder sensor step operation in here
and the field oriented control at the highest end. Thanks for watching. Thanks for being with me here today. And I hope you found this useful and learned something about the
how to improve efficiency in motor control applications,
how to reduce stress levels by reducing audible noise
and other features that come with the ADI Trinamic motor and motion control
boards and solutions. For anything further Please go on Mouser.com Thank you. See you soon.