About that feedback device port

The feedback device port of Argon has “only” 15 pins, just like earlier drive model VSD-E, but tons of more of more capabilities have been squished into it. It has:

  • 5V 500 mA output
  • 5 differential input lines where 3 of them are bidirectional
  • 3 single-ended digital inputs
  • 2 differential 1 Vpp analog inputs
  • Differential inputs may be used with single ended signals as well

All this makes it possible to support many kinds of feedback devices such as:

  • Quadrature encoder with index channel
  • SinCos encoder with interpolation factor up to 1000x
  • Tachometer
  • Resolver (a.k.a. synchro)
  • Hall sensors
  • Serial encoderes (SSI, BISS etc). Support for example for Austria microsystems low cost magnetic linear & rotary encoders possible.

VSD-E could support only the first of them so I think the progress is quite significant.

What’s on board?

Describing it all on text would be too long and confusing, so I made a picture.

Argon functional internal layout

Argon functional internal layout

I’m sure questions will arise, so feel free to ask in comments!

Short circuits

Argon has pretty sophisticated circuit protection functionality. The device has sub-microsecond response short circuit sensing circuit that can detect phase-to-phase and phase-to-ground shorts. To counter harsh environment EMI and prevent false fault triggering, there is variable length digital delay filter for short circuit protection  – and this parameter is also user adjustable.

SC scoping

Short circuit scoping. Yellow trace is IGBT phase current 67 A/div and blue is power stage shutdown signal from DSP.

The oscillograph above displays a phase-to-ground short circuit when shorted by a piece of wire right at output terminals. Drive was driving an AC motor at supply voltage of > 200 VDC while wire is shorted to ground. The yellow output current graph shows current of 170 Amperes and pulse length of about 2 µs before shutdown was issued. I believe the blue digital trace is fluctuating because board’s ground plane is struggling to carry the enormous current.

The test has been repeated dozens of times with varying protection delay times and supply voltages, and no harm to hardware was ever induced. I’m satisfied.

Industrially made Argon boards

Last week I received first industrially made Argon circuit board assemblies from the factory. It’s pretty amazing feeling when more than a year of design work is finally shining on your desk.

Argon PCBA

Argon circuit board assemblies, first batch of release candidate boards

The boards came without bottom side power components mounted because I had mistakenly specified wrong size bridge rectifier to the BOM. Its height supposed to be 8 mm but factory reported that their parts have 11 mm height. That would make fitting to the enclosure pretty difficult. So I told them to supply bottom side parts unmounted as its no problem to solder them to place in here.