NXP’s ARM Micros With Motor Controllers

February 25, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 25 Comments

motor

It’s still relitavely early in the year, and all those silicon manufacturers are coming out with new toys to satiate the engineer and hobbyist for years to come. NXP’s offering is the LPC1500, a series of ARM microcontrollers optimized for motor and motion-control applications.

The specs for the new chips include an ARM Cortex-M3 running at 72MHz, up to 256kB Flash, 36kB SRAM, USB, CAN, 28 PWM outputs, an a real-time clock. There are options for controlling brushless, permanent magnet, or AC induction motors on the LPC1500, with dev boards for each type of motor. Each chip has support for two Despite NXP’s amazing commitment to DIP-packaged ARM chips, the LPC1500 chips are only available in QFP packages with 48, 64, and 100 pins.

Don’t think the LPC1500 would be a perfect chip for a CNC controller – the chips only support control of two motors. However, this would be a fantastic platform for building a few robots, an electric car, or a lot of the other really cool projects we see around here.

Galago, The Latest In A Series Of Awesome ARM Boards

September 10, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 31 Comments

Long time Hackaday reader [Kuy] sent in a project he’s been working on for the last year and a half. It’s called Galago, and it wraps up all the features we’d like to see in the current crop of ARM microcontroller dev boards into one neat package.

The Galago features an AMR Cortex-M3 microcontroller running at72 MHz. Included on its pinout are 25 digital IO pins, 6 analog input pins, 10 PWM pins, and an I2C and SPI port.

The Galago isn’t simply an exercise in hardware development, though. [Kuy] spent a great deal of time writing proper libraries for his board, allowing you to get started with the Galago very quickly without having to rely on crippled tools.

A proper library isn’t Galago’s only significant developer feature: [Kuy] went as far as to create a browser-based IDE (no Internet connection required, thankfully) that has the ability to upload code directly to the board via a USB cable. Add in a hardware debugger, and the Galago might just be the perfect ARM board for tinkerers weaning themselves off the Arduino.

[Kuy] has released the Galago on a Kickstarter, with a single board costing $25. It’s a cool device, and something we’d really like to come to market.