Introduction — The Project Brief
This case study covers the redevelopment of a brushless DC (BLDC) motor controller for a client who is a recognised market leader in their pump sector, with products sold and installed worldwide. The client had previously commissioned one of Zikodrive's earliest controller designs for their product line, and this project represented a significant redevelopment of that original platform — driven not by a failure of the first design, but by the client's ambition to make programmability and configurability a genuine market differentiator for their product.
The resulting controller operates at up to 24V / 5A continuous (running) and 30V / 10A peak, giving it the headroom to handle demanding start conditions and variable load pumps while running efficiently within its normal operating envelope. Critically, the brief required a controller that could be as simple or as sophisticated as the end application demanded — usable straight out of the box with nothing more than power, startup, and run, while also offering a deep set of programmable options for customers and installers who needed finer control.
Project Background and Objectives
Because the client sells into a global market, their pumps end up installed by a huge range of end users, from straightforward domestic or light commercial installs through to more demanding industrial applications with variable loads and specific performance requirements. A single fixed-function controller could never serve that breadth of use cases well — but neither could a controller so complex that simple installations became a burden. The redevelopment project set out to resolve that tension directly.
Key objectives included:
- Significantly expanding programmability and configuration options compared to the original controller, making flexibility a genuine competitive advantage for the client's product line
- Retaining simple, reliable operation for installers who just need power-on, startup, and run with no configuration at all
- Supporting analogue input setup, so the controller could be driven directly from external sensors or control signals in more sophisticated installations
- Providing preset speed options for common, repeatable operating points
- Delivering constant speed control under changing load conditions, so pump performance stays consistent even as system conditions vary
- Adding pulse output functionality, enabling the controller to report speed or status information back to external systems
- Implementing current monitoring, giving both the controller and any connected system visibility into real-time load and health
- Introducing self-optimising setup, allowing the controller to be commissioned quickly across a wide range of different pump models without lengthy manual tuning
Why a Redevelopment, Not a New Platform
It's worth noting that this project began from a position of strength rather than necessity — the original pump controller developed by the custom design team was already a proven, working product in the field. The redevelopment was commercially, not technically, driven: programmability had become a key part of how the client wanted to compete in their market, and the original design simply hadn't been built with that scope in mind from the outset.
This is a fairly common pattern in bespoke motor control work — a first-generation controller solves the immediate problem, and once it's proven in the field, the client comes back wanting to build on that foundation with a broader feature set. Because the original platform was already well understood, the redevelopment could move faster and with more confidence than a completely clean-sheet design, while still representing a substantial engineering effort in its own right.
The original controller was a simple sensorless BLDC controller that worked well but lacked the programmability options needed by the customer
Balancing Simplicity and Sophistication
One of the central design challenges was ensuring that added complexity for advanced users never came at the cost of simplicity for everyone else. The controller had to work perfectly well for an installer who applies power and expects the pump to start and run correctly with zero configuration — while, underneath that simple surface, offering a genuinely deep set of programmable options for those who need them.
This was achieved by treating the advanced feature set as layered on top of sensible, tested default behaviour, rather than requiring every installation to pass through a setup process. Preset speed options, analogue input control, and constant-speed-under-load behaviour are all available when needed, but none of them get in the way of the straightforward "power on and run" use case that the majority of installations still rely on.
Self-Optimising Setup
Perhaps the most technically interesting addition in this redevelopment was the self-optimising commissioning feature. The client supplies their controllers across a genuinely wide range of pump models, and manually tuning each controller-pump pairing for optimal performance was neither practical nor commercially viable — their customers needed pumps up and running quickly, not after an extended manual tuning process.
The self-optimising function allows the controller to establish appropriate operating parameters for the connected pump automatically during initial startup, removing the need for manual tuning in the majority of cases. This directly addresses the client's real-world commercial requirement: getting a wide range of pump variants operational quickly, without every installation requiring specialist knowledge or extended setup time.
The new controller kept the same form factor as the earlier version but added significantly more capability to the platform
Current Monitoring and System Visibility
The addition of current monitoring gives the controller — and, by extension, the systems it's connected to — real-time visibility into motor load. Beyond its diagnostic value, this ties directly into the controller's ability to maintain constant speed under changing load conditions, since accurate current sensing is a key input to detecting and compensating for load variation in real time. Combined with the pulse output feature, the controller can report operational status back to external monitoring or control systems, extending its usefulness well beyond a standalone motor driver.
The first production batch of the new pump controller coming off the production line
Outcome
The redeveloped controller successfully expanded the client's product capability from a single-purpose design into a flexible platform capable of serving their full global customer base — from simple, zero-configuration installs through to sophisticated, load-responsive, remotely monitored applications. The self-optimising setup function in particular addressed a genuine commercial pain point, enabling rapid deployment across a wide range of pump models without the extended tuning overhead that would otherwise have been required.
For a client operating as a market leader with worldwide distribution, the ability to offer this range of configurability — without complicating installation for the majority of straightforward use cases — represents a meaningful competitive advantage, and demonstrates the value of revisiting and building on a proven controller platform rather than starting from scratch.riting here...