Design of a digital system dedicated for electrical drive applications

The aim of this paper is to present the design of a rapid prototype drive system with small size, low cost and high ejfi-ciency. It depends basically on the personal computer (PC) processor without the need for any external processor (e.g. digital signal processor (DSP)) to get fast execution of control algorithms, and to support floating point operations. The PC-based rapid-prototyping system is dedicated for laboratory purposes and consists of an extension kit with all required interface boards to perform the simulation and implementation of electrical drive algorithms. Almost all designed boards are based on programmable-logic devices (PLD) to reduce cost and size. To operate the hardware of the proposed system, a free available open source real-time operating system (RTOS) kernel under Linux is used. A case study from electric drive area is selected and numerous experimental results are given in order to demonstrate the good functionality of the conceived system.