Motor Control Stability Issues with DMC60

[salai]

Hello,

We have a prototype tool that uses your DMC60 – and occasionally see (what I believe) are control-based issues. I don’t know exactly what may be the cause – but my thoughts are:

• Sometimes the system “disconnects” from the motor – despite the controller LEDs showing that movement should be induced (i.e. the PWM control signals are correct?)
  • A simple power cycling resets this and seems the restore motor rotation – what can we do to remove this error?
• Sometimes the controller shows flashing red LEDs, alternating in pairs. I couldn’t find what this error means in your manual – could you please advise?
  • If this is an input signal issue, we have an Arduino that controls the PWM input – would you recommend some conditioning circuit that can smooth out this PWM signal?

Appreciate your help.

Sam

[JColvin]

Hi @salai,

I have reached out to get some more details about the issues you are seeing.

I do agree that it seems like a control based issue, though I'm not certain on the root cause. To get some more clarification about your system, could you tell me more about the Arduino PWM input? What sort of pulse width input and and period are you using? I presume the Arduino receives some sort of external control signal to indicate what sort of PWM signals to send out?

In terms of smoothing out the signal, if you are worried about small spikes on the signal lines (I imagine that this unlikely to occur unexpectedly), a small low-pass filter could probably be added though you will want to make sure that the PWM signals themselves are not significantly changed in their timing (or at least changed greater than the supported 1 uS resolution of the DMC60 if your design parameters are strict). As a check, when the LEDs are flashing alternating in pairs, they are red and not orange?

Thanks,
JColvin