Arduino shields enable RGB lighting & motor control

8th December 2014

Nat Bowers

0 0

Compatible with the Arduino Uno R3, two shields have been announced by Infineon Technologies for RGB lighting and motor control applications. Both shields can be combined with the XMC1100 Boot Kit which is equipped with a 32-bit MCU from the XMC1000 family.

Powered by the XMC1202 MCU, the RGB LED Lighting Shield from Infineon is an intelligent evaluation board for Arduino which allows the adoption of different LED light engines to ensure fast prototyping and inexpensive evaluation.The XMC1200 series provides all essentials for high-quality colour, such as full dimming control and flicker-free light at all dimming levels with low energy consumption. The BCCU automated hardware engine provides a cost sensitive and flexible high-quality LED lighting solution. Offering three independent output channels for flicker-free multicolour LED control, the shield is easy-to-configure and ensures smooth dimming and colour mixing. It can be expanded by using a DMX interface for lighting and audio nodes or a 24GHz radar sensor for motion detection.

Implementing two NovalithIC BTN8982TA fully integrated high-current half-bridge drivers optimised for motor drive applications, the DC Motor Control Shield for Arduino can drive two uni-directional DC motors or one bi-directional DC motor. The shield enables the fast and cost-effective prototyping of DC motor control designs with easy testing of half-bridge and full-bridge motor control applications.

The NovalithIC BTN8982TA combines three ICs in one package: two power chips (one p-channel high-side MOSFET and one n-channel low-side MOSFET) and an integrated driver IC with one logic circuit to control and monitor the power. Further feature highlights are diagnosis with current sense, slew rate adjustment, dead time generation and protection against over temperature, undervoltage, overcurrent and short-circuit. Interfacing to an MCU is easy since the NovalithIC BTN8982TA features logic level inputs.

The BTN8982TA provides a cost-optimised solution for protected high-current PWM motor drives with very low board space. The DC Motor Control Shield with BTN8982TA for Arduino can handle high-frequency PWM of 30kHz, for example. The Shield supports brushed DC motor control up to 250W continuous load while the BTN8982TA's current limitation allows peak-currents up to 55A.

Both shields, the RGB Lighting Shield with XMC1202 for Arduino and the DC Motor Control Shield with BTN8982TA for Arduino, are available now.