[ardenum2]

Hi Ardenum,
I use this development board:

https://www.digikey.co.nz/en/product...BoC_DoQAvD_BwE

Lots to recommend it. The micro is optimised for rotating machinery and has all the periphials that you can dream of and more, including really tightly timed complementary PWM with programmable deadzone, sequential PWM
signals for polyphase systems, cycle by cycle current and voltage limits, dual encoder inputs, plus all the usual timers,analogue inputs and all the rest. The board has a galvanaically isolated D100 JTag. If you use the
onboard JTag then you get free unlimited use of CodeComposerStudio, Texas Instruments own IDE including the Insta-Spin software libraries. You can use this development board right up to production. In my case
I just drop it into my drive complete, saves having to write a bootloader. All-in-all Texas Instruments have tried to squeeze everything in that you might ever want, all for free or at least cheap to encourage your use of
Texas Instruments silicon. This particular IC (TMS320F28069M) is about $20USD each (1000 unit rate), so hardly expensive.

Craig

In other words, if you were to work on a linear drive, this board has all that's needed, hardware wise, only needs to be programmed for a specific use? I'm hoping to handle the magnetics part of the linear servo, it's been my long term dream to work on motors. I'm planning to get a base model from SMJ, give it a test with an off the shelf drive and then compare that to the linear motor I'm working on, empirically.

Excitement guaranteed. Results not so much. There's plenty of things to consider in regards to eg. cogging issues like skewing magnets or destructive interference(which sounds awesome) etc. An important part would be a way to measure cogging.

Getting off the shelf drives will cost at least $1500 for 3 axis, I'd be more than interested to divert that to your R&D and end up with something open source that anyone can use, a $80 drive sounds a lot better than a $500. You think you could end up with something functional?