7 years, 8 months ago.

Which ARM to use?

One of the tasks I need to do is control a motor's speed and position using a quadrature encoder. Each motor has two sensors 90 degrees apart and there are 64 pulse per revolution. At 10,000 RPM we'd get 128,000 pulses per minute or about 2,000 per second. The system has four motors that need to be speed controlled via a PID loop. The PID loop runs at abut 25Hz and then commands and status info is also exchanged over a serial link to another computer. Other stuff goes on too like measuring the voltage and current of the battery and at each motor. The big processing load, I think is the interrupt which might be a total of 8,000 per second at the worst case. We'd have 6 or 8 tasks running at about 25Hz at most that are pretty simple like monitoring the current and limiting commanded accelerations and such.

This is to much for an Arduino. It can not quite handle all I need for even two motors.

In terms of processing power is this an M0 or an M4 job or what? I need a board that is running at about 50% capasity on day one so there is room for feature creep. Cost, value and power are issues. My guess is that a cortex-M4 at 48MHz with a FPU is enough and with room to grow. But I'm guessing.

2 Answers

7 years, 8 months ago.

I would recommend this board, one of the best seller in the mbed world: https://developer.mbed.org/platforms/ST-Nucleo-F401RE/

Accepted Answer

You likely suggested the F401RE based on my requirements. But is there any reason to not get an F446RE. It's faster and has more RAM and is $2 cheaper for some reason.

I'll likely end up with both plus the one above too.

posted by Chris Albertson 23 Aug 2016
7 years, 8 months ago.

Chris,

For the spec you've given it would be best to invest in M4.

A good starting point would be to look at :

https://developer.mbed.org/platforms/FRDM-K64F/

If you need anything else, let me know.

Best Regards,

Andrea, team mbed

Thanks, this looks like a very nice general purpose bed development board because of all the included peripherals. More than I need for my target application but it looks like the one to keep on the bench.

posted by Chris Albertson 23 Aug 2016

Looks like I can only "accept" one answer I tried to click on both

posted by Chris Albertson 23 Aug 2016