SimpleFOC: A Field Oriented Control (FOC) Library for Controlling Brushless Direct Current (BLDC) and Stepper Motors

📌 Overview

We present SimpleFOC, a C++ library implementing Field‑Oriented Control (FOC) for brushless DC (BLDC) and stepper motors, aiming to be both generic and cross‑platform (Open Journals).

Why It Matters

FOC is highly efficient for controlling electrically commutated motors but demands complex computations. Most existing implementations are tightly coupled to specific microcontrollers or hardware stacks (Open Journals). SimpleFOC fills that gap by offering a flexible, modular, platform‑agnostic approach.

Key Features

• Portable across hardware: supports Atmega, STM32, ESP32, RP2040, Teensy, Portenta, and platforms like Arduino UNO, Nucleo, etc. (Open Journals).
• Logical architecture: divides the system into modular blocks—motor, driver, sensors, microcontroller, UI—enabling easier swapping and reconfiguration (Open Journals).
• C++ object‑oriented design: encapsulates FOC routines, motion control, hardware interfaces, and configurations with intuitive APIs (Open Journals).
• Community‑driven: >250 GitHub forks, 600+ members engaged in discussions, and 10,000+ posts in its community platform as of mid‑2022 (Open Journals).

Core Value

SimpleFOC aims to democratize advanced motor control. It removes hardware vendor lock‑in, facilitating rapid experimentation and teaching in robotics, dynamic control systems, and embedded motion applications.

🔍 TL;DP Summary

@article {skuric2022simplefoc, title= {SimpleFOC: a field oriented control (FOC) library for controlling brushless direct current (BLDC) and stepper motors} , author= {Skuric, Antun and Bank, Hasan Sinan and Unger, Richard and Williams, Owen and Gonzalez-Reyes, David} , journal= {Journal of Open Source Software} , volume= {7} , number= {74} , pages= {4232} , year= {2022} }