Building a machine with electric motors? If so, ever wanted a motor drive that can control virtually any kind of motor you can come across?

We know that this kind of drive has been hard to find, but luckily not any more! The fearless goal of IONI project is to make an versatile drive that can control most of low voltage electric motors: DC/AC/brushless/linear servo motors and stepping motors.

IONI allows controlling motors in all three operating modes: position control, velocity control and torque control (torque mode only with servo motors). Applications of such control methods include

• Position control, such as CNC and 3D printing
• Velocity control, such as spindles or vehicle wheels
  
• Force / torque control, such as racing simulator wheel

• Step & direction digital signals (typical stepper drive interface, good for position control)
• Analog +/-10V signal (good for speed or torque control)
• PWM signal (good for speed or torque control)
• RS485 serial bus (talks SimpleMotion V2 bus protocol, open source library available)

Stretch goals

Devices

IONI Pro

This is the motor controller with similar connector that PCI-Express 8x uses. The electrical interface is not PCI-Express compatible, but a custom interface specified here. IONI Pro differs from IONI (standard) by feature set. At the present moment, features of IONI Pro and IONI are similar, but as time goes on, more features will be added to the Pro model as downloadable upgrades. See product page and  full tech specifications.

IONICUBE

IONICUBE is a motherboard to carry up to four IONI drives and provide user friendly terminals and connectors. The four axis design is especially suitable for multiaxis systems such as PC controlled CNC machines. Features & more info.

IONICUBE 1X

IONICUBE 1X is a motherboard to carry one IONI drive and provide user friendly terminals and connectors. IONICUBE 1X is the choice for the single axis systems such as motorized racing simulator wheels or a distributed motor control. IONICUBE 1X is under development thus it has longer delivery time than the 4 axis model.

Choosing a motor

As motor is not included, make sure that you have, or obtain a motor that is compatible with IONI. Learn more about motor types.

Servo motor requirements:

• Permanent magnet brush-DC, AC, brushless or linear motor
• Motor voltage rating 12-60 VDC (IONI supply voltage is 5 - 52 VDC)
  
• Motor current rating 0.5 - 15A (IONI maximum output is 15A)
  
• Servo motor must be equipped with an incremental encoder (position sensor) with resolution of 100 to 1000000 pulses per revolution.
  

Stepping motor requirements:

• Two-phase stepping motor with 0.5 - 10A current rating, no feedback device needed. Can be used in position and velocity control mode. Torque mode not possible. Stepper voltage rating is irrelevant, but generally lower voltage & higher current stepper is better.
  

Unsuitable/non-optimum motors:

• Any non-permanent magnet motors: induction AC motor or DC motor with field coil - will not work
  
• Cheapest grade DC motor, such as one extracted from power drill - might not give satisfying performance
  
• Motor with very high voltage, such as 200 VAC AC servo motor - it will work if it has incremental encoder feedback, but maximum rotation speed is limited due to drive voltage.

Demo

See a short demo of running various motors with the popular Mach3 CNC software:

The IONI advantage

• Simplified wiring & software configuration work
• Effortless upgrade from stepper based system to servo motors with minimal changes (utilizing existing step/dir control)
  
• Expandability - add more axis as needed, up to 32 by chaining IONICUBES
  
• Serviceability - replacing a drive is doable in less than a minute
• Industrial grade performance - this drive seconds to nothing when it's compared to it's peers
• Low heating - even with highest loads, a fan cooling is sufficient and with low loads, passive cooling will do
• Reliability - IONI bas been ruggedized against: output short circuit, supply voltage error, over temperature and ESD
  

Perks

2, 3 or 4 Axis IONI Pro Kit

Build a machine of 2, 3 or 4 motor axis with ease. The kit consists 2, 3 or 4 IONI Pro drives and a IONICUBE motherboard (More info) and a SMV2USB adapter (SMV2USB) needed for software based configuration.

to carry up to four IONI drives and provide user friendly terminals and connectors. The four axis design is especially suitable for multiaxis systems such as PC controlled CNC machines. 

Early bird perks are already in stock waiting for shipment.

1 Axis IONI Pro Kit

This kit includes one piece of IONI Pro drive, IONICUBE 1X and SimpleMotion V2 USB adapter. Estimated shipment happens between April-May 2015 (as soon as we get IONICUBE 1X's from fab).

Drive configuration

Drive needs wiring and software configuration to start operating. The wiring guide is work-in-progress but will be online in the Wiki before product deliveries. The configuration involves parameterization and motor tuning through freely downloadable Granity software.

About us & Project status

Project has been planned in conjunction with open community of openservodrive.com and the device design has been made by a Finnish Granite Devices company. Granite Devices has eight year experience of servo motor drives and motor controls of this kind. See our earlier motor controller product portfolio.

The development of IONI began one year ago and it has now passed all the prototyping and hardware design work. The firmware & software side of IONI is also complete, however few of the planned advanced features are still under development. IONI has user upgradeable firmware, so as soon as the new features are finished, they become available for download.

Craftmanship

Yes, you will be receiving a fully finished design with all the rough corners of prototypes made within one year prototyping period smoothed out. IONI has been built on a 6 layer circuit board with double thickness (70 um) copper layers for more efficient cooling of on-board power electronics.

During the prototyping we found IONI to exceed our power capability expectations, so we bumped from PCI-E 4X connector to PCI-E 8X in order to favor higher currents.

Risks & Challenges - please read

As the product is already there (except IONICUBE 1X at time of writing), there is no risk of not getting the item you paid for, nor getting sub-par quality. The largest remaining risk lies within the utilization of IONI. As these are not cars, you can't just jump in and turn the key. To successfully use IONI, user needs to understand the concepts servo motor / stepping motor control and how to wire everything together.

To overcome the installation difficulties, we are maintaining a Wiki dedicated for motor control and user guides with step-by-step instructions. The Wiki is written to cover the basic knowledge and installation in the typical use cases.  The Wiki is constantly expanded to cover the most frequently asked questions we are getting.