Designed as a housing-free board with a footprint of 40 mm by 60 mm, the CL3-E controller from Nanotec, Medford, Mass, is intended for small stepper and brushless DC (BLDC) motors with a continuous output of up to 70 W. The board offers a wide range of applications for a variety of motors and interfaces, such as open-loop stepper motors that respond autonomously to digital inputs, and dynamic BLDC motors with encoders that are controlled through the controller area network (CAN). The board also supports the company’s sensorless closed-loop control of stepper motors, in addition to miniature BLDC motors and stepper motors with a size of up to NEMA 23.
With an operating voltage of 12–24 V, a nominal current of 3 A, and a peak current of 6 A, the controller can be connected via USB, CANopen, RS232, or RS485 interfaces. It features five digital inputs, two analog inputs, and three digital outputs.
Applications developed in the NanoJ programming language can be executed directly in the unit. The programs are synchronized with the digital inputs and outputs, in addition to instructions received from the field bus in 1-ms cycles through the real-time operating system. Simple applications can then be performed without higher-level control, reducing the bus load and leaving the higher level controller unburdened during complex operations.
For more information, visit Nanotec.
