Reason #5 to consider i.MX RT1010 – It can spin motors

[Kathleen]

All engineers – and most anyone – love to make things spin, right? That explains the revenue made on those fidget spinners. The inventor is a genius! OK ok … now back to MCUs … the i.MX RT MCU motor control demos are some of the most highly viewed demos. So what makes the i.MX RT1010 device ideal for motor control applications? Is it the FlexPWM? The ADC? Or just the raw performance of this 500 MHz MCU? The answer – all of the above.  The i.MX RT1010 MCU is an ideal solution for a single motor and here’s why:

• Arm® Cortex®-M7 core, up to 500 MHz
  • 16 KB L1 instruction cache and 8 KB L1 data cache
  • Up to 128KB on-chip RAM that can be configured as I-TCM and D-TCM or general-purpose on chip RAM
• FlexPWM  
  • 4 sub-modules with A, B, X PWM outputs in each FlexPWM
  • Separated 16-bit counter for center, edge-aligned, and asymmetrical PWMs for each sub-module
  • Easily configured to work in synchronous mode
  • Multiple output h/w triggers generated per PWM cycle
• 12-bit ADC with up to 1MS/s sampling rate and 15 input channels selected by h/w or s/w triggers
• ADC_ETC to share an ADC in a time-division-multiplexing way and to sync trigger between trigger initiator and ADC
• 32-bit PIT for periodical interrupt generation
• 2 x 32-bit GPT with 2 input capture Channels and 3 output compare Channels 

And let’s not forget about software.  The MCUXpresso SDK for i.MX RT products includes the motor control libraries (for BLDC, PSMS, and ACIM).  SDK examples are also included and are based on these libraries.

Check out this demo video here.