Link Update / Sensorless Gen. 1 Documentation

All of the documentation links on my site are dead.

It will take me some time to go through each one and re-link it to its new location. For the most part, everything will mirror to a Google Drive Amazon S3 folder, as such:

http://web.mit.edu/scolton/www/filter.pdf is no more. For some reason it is without a doubt my most downloaded file. I guess I will take that as a complement. The new location is:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/scolton-www/docs/filter.pdf

Other documents of importance in http://web.mit.edu/scolton/www/ are moved to that same shared folder. Some more examples:

http://web.mit.edu/scolton/www/SCThG.pdf has gone to:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/scolton-www/motordrive/SC_ThG.pdf

http://web.mit.edu/scolton/www/MSCR_Rev1.pdf has gone to:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/scolton-www/motordrive/MSCR_Rev1.pdf

Since it's a shared folder, you can look at what else has been moved:

https://googledrive.com/host/0B0ZbiLZrqVa6Y2d3UjFVWDhNZms/
https://scolton-www.s3.amazonaws.com/list.html
[Edit: Sorry! Google Drive disabled hosting. I've moved individual files over to Amazon S3 and will update links accordingly.]

In return for temporarily killing all of my documentation links, I will post some new old documentation that has been a long time coming:

Flux Observer-Based Sensorless Field-Oriented Control of  Surface Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors (Gen. 1)
or, What Does the Flux Say?

https://s3.amazonaws.com/scolton-www/motordrive/sensorless_gen1_Rev1.pdf

This is an attempt to document my first attempt at sensorless field-oriented control (hence, Generation 1). The hardware implementation of this method was finished more than a year ago, but the documentation has been slow to catch up. I did a few posts on it, but only teased at the complete documentation of the Gen. 1 method. Well, here it is. Better late than never, I guess.

Originally, I expected this method to be a baseline, possibly the simplest implementation I could think of that would lead to more advanced techniques. Maybe Gen. 2 will be that step. But as is usually the case with my projects, just the act of actually building hardware and software has helped clarify my understanding of the problem, to the point where I could actually see the benefits of the simpler method and work it into an analysis framework that allows it to be deployed quickly and easily on new motors. And by quickly and easily, I mean with great pain and frustration unless you have a thorough understanding of how it works. Which is the point of the document, I guess.

For sure, the solution is not complete and not even ideal. It's just something that I use as a technical reference and might be useful in that context to others as well. I don't plan on commercializing the implementation because of the effort that would be involved in bringing it up to the level of being a reliable and user-friendly product, or even a development kit capable of being used by others to create such a product. (If it is to be commercialized, the improvements over Gen. 1 will be proprietary anyway.) But hopefully the information it has can be useful.

If you are looking for more of a developer-friendly kit / API for sensorless FOC, Texas Instruments has a solution called Instaspin FOC that I've been following since before it existed (motor control hipster-style): 

http://www.ti.com/ww/en/mcu/instaspin/instaspin-foc.shtml?DCMP=c2x-instaspin&HQS=instaspin-foc

Although I can't be sure, I suspect the basis for it is also a flux observer. I'm sure the implementation is a lot more thorough, though.

Anyway, the field of motor control is vast and there is tons of information available. What's needed are people to take that information and use it, yes, but also improve it. Not just copy-paste into a system but also twist it into something different, find a better and faster way to do it, port it to new hardware. Not just ask questions about it but answer them in a new way. That's the challenging and fun part, IMO. Good luck!

Now back to fixing dead links...