Issues with the library on different boards

1

Hi,
I have a project that needs to drive a motor quite fast and that use a AS5048a magnetic sensor as encoder.

I first developped it on the Arduino UNO without issues except its computation capacity (16mHz, loop called every 1 ms). I purchased different boards (nano connect, nano esp32, nucleo L432KC, teensy 4.0, pi pico) in order to overcome this limit.

I had a generic sketch that drove the motor in velocity openloop.
The loop() (motor.loopFOC + motor.move(targetSpeed) took 40 ms on a rp2040 board (pi pico and nano connect, arduino-pico 3.1.1 and simple FOC 2.3.4).
Upgrading the arduino-pico board to 4.3.1, The same loop took 50 us.
However, the MagneticSensorSPI base class .init() blocks the program. I used an homemade sensor class to overcome that and test.

I tried the NUCLEO-L432KC board, but as soon as the simplefoc library is included, the program compiles but is not executed (tried with blink…).
The nucleo board is STM32 MCU based boards 2.9.0.

I also tried an esp32 nano board but I couldn’t program without force reseting the board. This issue was not related to the simple foc library

2

Hi @nakeze,
It’s definitely possible to overcome your 1 ms limit. I use an ESP32 to drive two motors in closed-loop mode (and two AS5048a, using this driver) and I achieve 0.15 ms.

3

Hi Quentin,
Yes it is definitely possible, with teensy and rp2040, the loop is over 10 khz. I wanted to list the issues that I faced, which were :

  • Poor computation time with an old arduino-pico version.
  • Code than don’t run on nucleo-L432KC stm32 2.9.0 even though compilation is fine.

I know that it must be hard to maintain and document all these different combinations. Maybe the page : Microcontrollers | Arduino-FOC could get a boad version and simple foc version compatibility that were tested at new release.

4

If the code is not hanging but initialization fails somewhere, you can enable the debug build flag for stm:

SIMPLEFOC_STM32_DEBUG

You can enable it by adding this to the build_blags in platformio.ini if you use platformio:

-D SIMPLEFOC_STM32_DEBUG

You also need to add this to your code:

void setup(){
  Serial.begin(115200);
  SimpleFOCDebug::enable(&Serial);
  delay(3000); // wait 3s to connect serial console on PC
  ...
}

You will then get more details on the serial output.