Building a multicore Cortex M1-based PMDC motor controller

In “Multicore Based Closed Loop PMDC Motor Controller Embedded System,” K. S. Vijula Grace and K. Baskaran describe a fully integrated multicore based embedded system for controlling a Permanent-Magnet Direct Current (PMDC) motor, which uses a combination of an FPGA and Cortex-M1 cores.

A train of pulses with variable frequencies are generated from the Cortex-M1 core and used to control the speed of the motor. An MOC sensor is placed on the motor side and used to calculate the running speed of the motor using a proportional-integrative (PI) algorithm running on an FPGA to act as a feedback circuit to maintainthe motor with constant speed.