Segfault: Balancing Transport Using A Dozen Op-amps

The Segfault is a balancing transport similar to a Segway, but it uses analog comparators instead of digital circuitry. On board you’ll find no less than twelve LMC6484 op amps. They take signals from the gyroscope and the accelerometer, balance and filter them, then drive the motor h-bridges accordingly.

[Charles], the guy behind the Segfault, is also the one responsible for DeathBlades. As with that project he does just as well at documenting as he does at fabrication. Take some time to enjoy his posts associated with this two-wheeled-wonder (especially the build process) and then watch in the video after the break.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmsUr2JLXLI&w=470]

[via Make]

15 thoughts on “Segfault: Balancing Transport Using A Dozen Op-amps

  1. Giving that is the motor that is producing the high pitch sound due to the working frequency of the controller, can’t he just put a capacitor and resistor to make a simple high-pass filter?

  2. Haha, this is great. I’m all for microcontrollers and I’ve never done much discrete stuff like this, but I can appreciate the effort and also the balls it takes to do this old school.

    Also @MrX, i think the resistor and capacitor would need to be rated to very high currents and so they’d be large and wasteful. Normally you just run these things at a higher frequency and its fine. I don’t yet know a whole lot about the different frequencies, but I know you can go to 20KHz and most people can’t hear it, while staying within the realm of good switching frequencies for these things.

  3. @Taylor Alexander

    Oh. I meant low-pass filter – which ends up being just a capacitor in parallel with the motor.

    You have a point regarding the high-current though. For that filtering frequency, the cap must be in the nF scale where standard caps are small and “weak”.

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