MotorAST: a Low-Cost High-Performance Rapid Control Prototype Platform for Electric Drives

The concept of rapid control prototype provides great convenience for the research in power electronics and electric drives. In recent years, lots of rapid control prototype platforms have been commercialized. Although these commercial platforms boast powerful features and capabilities, the expensive price and the closed software environment also limit their implementation in some scenarios. This paper presents a low-cost rapid control prototype platform called MotorAST developed based on Texas Instruments F28388D controlCARD. The hardware and software architecture of the platform will be describe in detail in the article and the performance of the platform will be demonstrated through the experiment using model predictive control on a permanent magnet synchronous motor. Benefit from the robust real-time processing ability of F28388D and the flexible software configuration for each part of the platform, MotorAST can deliver excellent performance with low material costs.