Simucube social media pages open!

Posted on 22.11.2018 by Tero

Hello Sim Racers,

To make it easier to stay in loop and get the latest updates on Simucube direct drive sim racing, we have just launched Simucube Twitter account and Simucube Facebook page 1. To be the first to know about new features and competitive advantages they give, be sure to follow at least one of them.

We have plans to uncover several biggest direct drive related news of the year pretty soon on the Simucube channels. You don’t want to miss that.

Bonus

To celebrate the launch of the new community channels, we will post special Black Friday coupon codes exclusive to the said channels. The special coupons will work only for the first 5+5 orders. So especially if you’re planning to start a DIY Simucube build, better keep eye on Twitter and FB.

SimuCUBE is getting exciting changes

Posted on 16.8.2018 by Tero

During past two years we haven’t been resting on our sleeves on the development of the most ultimate force feedback controller, SimuCUBE.

Something extremely cool is about to be released in regard of SimuCUBE in this autumn. Stay tuned on our web/facebook/twitter pages to be the first to know!

Mach4 motion plugin for Granite Devices drives

Posted on 7.2.2018 by Tero

Today Granite Devices turns 11 years! Our team of 8 people thank all our community members for making this journey so awesome!

In the other news, we have just released the first open beta version of Mach4 Granite Devices motion control plugin. All CNC users out here, welcome to test it with your IONI, ARGON and soon to be released ATOMI drives! Grab a free Mac4 plug-in download from our Wiki.Shortly put, the plug-in makes it possible to control drives straight from PC USB port. No middle-hardware or step pulse generators needed.

If you try it, drop a comment below, or at our community forum thread here.

Wanted: hacker

Posted on 19.9.2017 by Tero

Curious to learn what’s inside in the top-tier servo drives? Want to put your ideas in motion? Are you a natural born microcontroller hacker suited for the job?

In other words, we’re now hiring the best of the best hacker available to take a major role in servo drive firmware development. If your socks started spinning already, don’t miss this once-in-a-lifetime chance and drop Granite Devices your CV now!

Community forum launched!

Posted on 5.4.2017 by Tero

I’m excited to announce brand new community forum to seed brainstorming and ideas around motor control related projects. The community forum is the first-hand media to get the latest updates of motor control development.

First 50 community members will be given an exclusive access to a private SimuCUBE’s beta testing forum. They will be the first ones to get to test-drive the beta when it’s released.

Join now at: https://community.granitedevices.com

This forum will be also the official discussion forum for this Blog. The link is on the top navigation bar. See you there :)

Argon servo drive firmware 2.1 adds SinCos encoder support

Posted on 22.2.2017 by Tero

The just released Argon servo drive firmware version 2.1.0 adds support for encoders with analog Sin/Cos outputs. Drive allows selecting interpolation factors of 16, 64 and 256 for such encoder. This means that an sin/cos encoder with 1000 lines per revolution, would give resolution equivalent of 256*1000 lines. In addition to this, normal quadrature decoder 4x gain applies on top of that, meaning that 1000 line encoder will yield total resolution of 1024000 counts per revolution.

The FW upgrade contains also many other improvements based on the user feedback that we have received. For full list & download, see firmware page at wiki.

New ATOMI servo & stepper drive boards are here!

Posted on 18.11.2016 by Tero

Earlier announced ATOMI is finally getting the focus it deserves! Now we have second revision boards under our scope for testing and firmware development. From initial tests, we can tell that we’re very close to the final design. At the moment it looks like we need only to change one resistor value on the PCB to make it final.

Four axis drive ATOMI boards along with 400W AC servo motor and IONI Pro HC drive

We can thank Esa Hippolin from the beautiful hardware design.

Perfecting BLDC performance

Posted on 17.10.2016 by Tero

Something cool is under development relating to BLDC (brushless DC) motors. BLDC is similar technology to sinusoidal AC motors but with trapezoidal voltage waveform. This makes BLDC little bit smaller and usually cheaper than AC motor.

While I’m typing this, in running a FEM simulation of outrunner BLDC motor to optimize the electrical commutation phase angle for such motor. Iterative simulation takes some 20 hours to compute.

Finding optimum commutation angle makes it possible to implement MTPA (maximum torque per amp) drive algorithm for such engines. Such efficiency boost might be very beneficial especially in battery powered applications such as multicopters, but of course it also will benefit squeezing more out of the existing motors. More about that later!

Simulator wireless magnetic paddle shifters and buttons

Posted on 5.8.2016 by Tero

It’s time to make another post about amazing work of Juha. Now he has completed his design of magnetic paddle shifters as well as wireless transceiver. A group of us did test drive of the wheel and everyone immediately fell in love with the snappy feeling of magnetic shifters.

The magnetic switch has a micro switch and a small permanent magnet to produce the “spring” force of the paddle.