The Gimbal Control Electronics System is designed as a high reliability motor driver system to control the motion of two or more motors, such as used in solar array drivers and antenna gimbals.

The GCE system controls and drives two types of dual axis redundant actuators such as used for typical solar array drives and antenna gimbals. The system contains two primary and two redundant motor drive outputs. These motor drive outputs control and drive small, three phase Wye, six state, and permanent- magnet actuators. The GCE contains two primary and redundant incremental encoder interface circuits.

The GCE communicates with the spacecraft via a dual redundant MIL-STD-1553B bus. The spacecraft provides the 31VDC nominal voltage and the side enable pulsed discretes. The GCE assembly consists of two identical Controllers circuit boards, two identical Motor Driver circuit boards, two identical DC to DC converters boards, two Backplane boards and the chassis.

Please contact Broad Reach Engineering for detailed information.

The Robotic Arm Motor Drive Electronics is a 9 Joint Arm Motor Controller Unit with a host command and control interface via RS-422. The unit consists of 9 controller boards, a communications board, and power conversion electronics.

Each motor controller board drives a single motor with varying capacities from 1A to 10A. Control functions are implemented in local FPGAs using a BRE proprietary DSP implementation with only high level inputs from the host. The unit is single redundant but contains a number of fault monitoring and fault protection features.

Please contact Broad Reach Engineering for detailed information.

Custom Motor Driver Implementations

The two designs shown above are very specific implementations for a particular motor system design. Custom solutions or variations to the above designs are available. Contact Broad Reach Engineering for a solution that meets your specific needs.