Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation ("Toshiba") is further enhancing its support for motor control design projects through its ecosystem of technology partners. The new evaluation platform is now available to customers thanks to the expanded collaboration between Toshiba and MikroElektronika (MIKROE).
Toshiba M4K MCU dedicated MIKROE Clicker 4 development board combined with Clicker 4 inverter expansion board is a cost-effective and simple solution for experimenting BLDC motor control scenarios. Clicker 4 for TMPM4K comes with an onboard debugger, no external debugger is required. Its four mikroBUS™ sockets can be connected to many different MIKROE Click boards™, so it can be expanded for more functions. There are also expansion connectors, JTAG/SWD debug ports, LED indicators and buttons. This board comes with the Clicker 4 Inverter Expansion Board, which is a power supply with six MOSFETs for motor drive, a switching power supply that regulates the motor supply voltage up to 48V, and a regulated 5V power supply that can be used by an external controller board. A flexible interface on the board allows positioning feedback from Hall sensors and incremental encoders. In addition, it has an overcurrent protection function to ensure stability and reliability.
M4K MCUs are widely used across the industry and have proven to be ubiquitous in enabling next-generation motor control. These devices rely on an Arm® Cortex®-M4 processor core with a Floating Point Unit (FPU) and Memory Protection Unit (MPU) providing 160MHz operation and advanced programmable motor driver (A-PMD) capabilities , and the Advanced Vector Engine (A-VE+) function for vector control purposes. Its memory resources include 256KB of code flash and 32KB of data flash.
The MCU Motor Studio software supports the TMPM4K dedicated Clicker 4 and Clicker 4 inverter expansion boards. Available for download on the Toshiba website, the software is simple, well-structured and versatile, and consists of two core components: a motor control PC tool for parameter configuration, drive control, real-time logging and diagnostics via a high-speed UART, and a second is a scalable, fully configurable motor control firmware for M4K MCUs.
