Real-time motor control software development
Learn how S2E Systems delivered real-time motor control software and automated test frameworks for Danfoss Drives during a 3-year consultancy retainer.
About Danfoss Drives
Danfoss Drives is a global developer, manufacturer, and supplier of AC drives. Its portfolio of high-quality, application-optimized VACON® and VLT® products maximizes process performance, saves energy, and minimizes emissions.
Danfoss estimates that more than 5 billion people (over 50% of the estimated world population) will benefit directly or indirectly from Danfoss Drives in their everyday lives. Their installed base of drives is projected to save the annual equivalent of 60 hours of global energy consumption.
Project Goal
Given our deep expertise in the combined areas of software development and control engineering, Danfoss Drives approached us to strengthen their Motor Control Software development team.
Danfoss Drives faced competing market demands: the team had to develop a new product family while simultaneously delivering new features for the existing FC product line. This stretched their internal engineering capacity beyond what they could staff.
Our goal was not only to provide additional engineering capacity to implement new features within their complex existing codebase but also to inject external expertise and best practices for significant software quality improvement.
What We Achieved
Over the 3 year engagement, our team has both completely reworked existing software architecture and successfully implemented critical new features in C and C++ for embedded real-time systems. Key implementations included:
- Kinetic backup
- Motor flying start
- Advanced Energy Optimization on multiple motor types
The implementation of these feature typically involved getting input on the algorithms from control engineering and converting these into C code using fixed-point arithmetic. The control code was running on a DSP processor without a RTOS but with very strict real-time requirements to ensure the control stability.
To ensure the rigorous quality required for Danfoss products, our engineers followed the certified processes used by Danfoss Drives for software development. We executed extensive automated testing and validation on dedicated, hardware test bench environments at our offices.
Figure 1: Motor test stand at the S2E Systems office
Business Impact
Our contribution enabled Danfoss Drives to continue releasing market-driven features for the FC product family at short notice, maintaining their competitive position while their internal team focused on developing the next-generation product line.