Trinamic’s TMC5161 + Microchip’s AVR-IoT WG + Digi-Key’s IoT Studio Temp

By Rolf Horn

Kickstart and Innovate your blinds control design

This project uses a novel approach using Trinamic’s IC's with Microchip’s AVR-based board espousing their features and fitting to the problem to control your blind remotely with your smart phone for two axes for up/down and rotation.

Finally our development environment is used as one tool called DK IoT Studio that can easily develop an IoT product.

If this is your very 1st project with DK IoT Studio, please follow this link for more information and how to get started …. and/or watch our video on YouTube Digi-Key IoT Studio Elements.

Let’s go into the project as we have made it available for you here.

Because pictures tell more than long explanations, let me start with some screenshots as below jpg’s from our IoT Studio to get familiar with this Trinamic and AVR IoT (Internet-of-Things) DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Smart Home Automation Project:

Trinamic’s TMC5161 (1460-1353-1-ND / 1460-1354-ND) + Microchip’s AVR-IoT WG (AC164160-ND) + Digi-Key’s IoT Studio Template

Trinamic IoT Template in the Cloud

Let me attach the complete code file for the Atmosphere project and the Trinamic driver.

You should be able to connect and provision your board and control it through the online app view.

The app has sliders for setting position, velocity, acceleration, direction and a stop button.

Trinamic IoT Template for Application incl. sliders for setting position, velocity, acceleration & direction

As kind of a short introduction or a teaser together with this Proof Of Concept (POC) as blinds control story please tell other makers or inspire interested technicians to use our code and implement this 1st idea to a complete working example of home automation to control your blinds and/or curtains with silent stepper motor drivers.

We used this HYBRID Bipolar Stepper Motor QSH8618-96-55-700 with 5.5A / 2.56VDC from our complete TMC2209 Motor Controller/Driver Power Management Evaluation Board TMC2209-EVAL-KIT.

The source code for the Embedded Element Library (EEL) is located here:

https://github.com/eewiki/tmc5161_eel

https://github.com/eewiki/tmc5161_eel/blob/master/Trinamic IoT Demo.atmo

If you want to rebuild it, you’ll need the Atmosphere scripts located here: https://github.com/atmosphereiot/eel-builder

Please consider these two notes:

• If you customize and rebuild the EEL, you have to create a new project each time because the file can’t be overwritten once you upload it.

The attached project template has everything in it but the Trinamic block and can be imported to make this process quicker.

• Values in the app are all percentages of some full scale value (less than the max allowable setting) set by some macros in the EEL.

These are mostly arbitrary and worked fine for testing at our lab, but if you want to use different values you’ll have to rebuild the EEL.

As further reference there is an eewiki article which has a more in-depth look at the EEL creation process. The article is now live with more details here: https://www.digikey.com/eewiki/x/_IAkBQ

There’s also a 3rd-Party PIC-IoT WG (AC164164-ND) Intro with attached Relay Click board (1471-1080-ND) on and off, controlling a fan and the temperature of the kit – see the details here:

https://forum.atmosphereiot.com/t/pic-iot-intro-project/268

More information about our DK IoT Studio is available here:

https://github.com/Digi-Key/DK-IoT-Studio

In our Reference Design Library under Motor Control we have already the TMC5160-BOB: Bipolar Stepper, 2.8A @ 9 ~ 36V 

https://www.digikey.de/reference-designs/de/motor-control/2592

The symbols and footprints will soon be available in our KiCad EDA (Electronic Design Automation) Tool.

There’s another helpful Application note: How to Connect the AVR IOT Node to the AWS Cloud:

https://www.microchip.com/wwwAppNotes/AppNotes.aspx?appnote=en611265

So it’s up to you to decide if you prefer to store your data for further analytics or intelligent automation maybe with Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML) on AWS, Google or your own proprietary cloud or server based solution.

Maybe you are looking for a link to an enclosure to hold the project, check this out –> CASING GRAY READY FOR PIC-AVR from MikroElektronika fits as 1471-1074-ND !

If you’re not convinced how to tie the hardware together yourself to control curtains / blinds motors you can also starting to google for complete solutions and possibly end up with one of these Off-The-Shelf (OTS) system offers:

Loxone-UK-Brochure-2018 replaced their 2017 version for blinds control in Smart Homes as pdf

www.loxone.com/enen/smart-home/blinds

zencontrol – the easiest way to add blind control to your existing DALI installation

https://zencontrol.com/blind-controller