Paddling Help From Electric-Assisted Kayak

Electric-assisted bicycles, or ebikes, are fundamentally changing the way people get around cities and towns. What were once sweaty, hilly, or difficult rides have quickly turned into a low-impact and inexpensive ways around town without foregoing all of the benefits of exercise. [Braden] hoped to expand this idea to the open waters and is building what he calls the ebike of kayaking, using the principles of electric-assisted bicycles to build a kayak that helps you get where you’re paddling without removing you completely from the experience.

The core of the project is a brushless DC motor originally intended a hydrofoil which is capable of providing 11 pounds (about 5 kg) of thrust. [Braden] has integrated it into a 3D-printed fin which attaches to the bottom of his inflatable kayak. The design of the fin took a few iterations to get right, but with a working motor and fin combination he set about tuning the system’s PID controller in a tub before taking it out to the open water. With just himself, the battery, and the motor controller in the kayak he’s getting about 14 miles of range with plenty of charge left in the battery after the trips.

[Braden]’s plans for developing this project further will eventually include a machine learning algorithm to detect when the rider is paddling and assist them, rather than simply being a throttle-operated motor as it exists currently. On a bicycle, strapping a sensor to the pedals is pretty straightforward, but we expect detecting paddling to be a bit more of a challenge. There are even more details about this build on his personal project blog. We’re looking forward to seeing the next version of the project but if you really need to see more boat hacks in the meantime be sure to check out [saveitforparts]’s boat which foregoes sails in favor of solar panels.

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Photograph of a BLDC motor controller circuit board

Take A Ride Through The Development Of A Custom BLDC Motor Controller

The folks over at the [Barkhausen Institut] are doing research into controlling autonomous fleets of RC cars and had been using off the shelf electronic speed controllers (ESCs) to control the car motors. Unfortunately they required more reliable feedback for closed loop control of the motors, so they created their own open source hardware brushless DC (BLDC) controller.

The motor controller they developed uses an STM32 microcontroller that talks to a TMC6140 3 phase MOSFET driver to drive 6 IRLR 2905 MOSFETs. The [Barkhausen Institut] researchers went with the SimpleFOC library as the basis to program the STM32, with installed hall effect sensors indicating motor orientation for their closed loop control.

Designing a functioning BLDC and ESC controllers can be subtle, and their post goes into details about the problems and solutions they came up with to deal with with what was ultimately improper isolation of the MOSFETs interfering with the power rail for the STM32. The source for their BLDC motor controller is available through their GitLab page. For more information on the parent project that uses the BLDC driver, be sure to check out their work on a connected convoy of RC cars.

There’s now a wealth of open source BLDC drivers and projects, many of which we’ve featured in the past, like the Moteus and haptic smart knob, and it’s nice to see other projects explore different options.

Motor-Driven Movement Modernizes POV Toy

Just as we are driven today to watch gifs that get better with every loop, people 100+ years ago entertained themselves with various persistence of vision toys that used the power of optical illusions to make still images come to life. [jollifactory] recently recreated one of the first POV devices — the phenakistoscope — into a toy for our times.

The original phenakistoscopes were simple, but the effect they achieved was utterly amazing. Essentially a picture disk with a handle, the user would hold the handle with one hand and spin the disk with the other while looking in a mirror through slits in the disk. Unlike the phenakistoscopes of yore that could only be viewed by one person at a time, this one allows for group watching.

Here’s how it works: an Arduino Nano spins a BLDC motor from an old CD-ROM drive, and two strips of strobing LEDs provide the shutter effect needed to make the pictures look like a moving image.The motor speed is both variable and reversible so the animations can run in both directions.

To make the disks themselves, [jollifactory] printed some original phenakistiscopic artwork and adhered each one to a CD that conveniently snaps onto the motor spindle. Not all of the artwork looks good with a big hole in the middle, so [jollifactory] created a reusable base disk with an anti-slip mat on top to spin those.

If you just want to watch the thing in action, check out the first video below that is all demonstration. There be strobing lights ahead, so consider yourself warned. The second and third videos show [jollifactory] soldering up the custom PCB and building the acrylic stand.

There are plenty of modern ways to build old-fashioned POV toys, from all-digital to all-printable.

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Model Hydroelectric Plant Is An Illuminating Educational Tool

There’s more than one way to light up a strip of LEDs. Have you tried building your own hydroelectric power plant to do it? Well, now you can. Replicating [Matic Markovič]’s entry into the 2020 Hackaday Prize is bound to teach you something, if not many things, about the way hydroelectric power is generated and the way the variables play into it.

In [Matic]’s model, water from an adjustable-height reservoir flows into a 3D-printed Pelton turbine. The water jet hits the turbine’s cupped fins at a 90° angle, causing the assembly to spin around rapidly. This mechanical energy charges a brushless DC motor that’s connected to an Arduino Nano, which rectifies the AC from the generator and uses it to light up an RGB strip like an equalizer display that represents the power being generated.

This is easily one of the coolest educational displays we’ve ever seen. The reservoir can move up and down over a 55 cm (21.6″) range with the flick of a three-way toggle, which makes it easy to see that the higher the reservoir, the more power is generated. [Matic] has the STLs and INOs in the usual places if you want to make your own. Flow past the break for a demonstration, followed by an exploded render that gets put back together by invisible hands.

Your hydroelectric setup doesn’t need to be fancy, it just needs to work. One man’s trash can be another man’s off-grid phone charger.

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3-Phase BLDC Motor Controller Will Run You $20 In Parts

If you’re an active shopper on RC websites, you’ll find tiny motors spec’ed at hundreds of watts while weighing just a few grams, like this one. Sadly, their complementary motor controllers are designed to drive them at a high speed, which means we can only hit that “520-watt” power spec by operating in a max-speed-minimum-torque configuration. Sure, that configuration is just fine for rc plane and multicopter enthusiasts, but for roboticists looking to drive these bldc motors in a low-speed-high-torque configuration, the searches come up blank.

The days in the dust are coming to an end though! [Cameron] has been hard at work at a low cost, closed-loop controller for the robotics community that will take a conventional BLDC airplane motor and transform it into a high end servo motor. Best of all, the entire package will only run you about $20 in parts–including the position sensor!

“Another BLDC motor controller?” you might think. “Surely, I’ve seen this before“. Fear not, faithful readers; [Cameron’s] solution will get even the grumpiest of engineers to crack a smile. For starters, he’s closing the loop with a Melexis MLX90363 hall effect sensor to locate the rotor position. Simply glue a small magnet to the shaft, calibrate the magnetic field with one revolution, and–poof–a wild 14-bit encoder has appeared! Best of all, this solution costs a mere $5 to $10 in parts.

Next off, [Cameron] uncovered a little-known secret of the ATMEGA32u4, better known as the chip inside the Arduino Leonardo. It turns out that this chip’s TIMER4 peripheral contains a feature designed exclusively for 3-phase brushless motor control. Complementary PWM outputs are built into 3 pairs of pins with configurable dead time built into the chip hardware. Finally, [Cameron] is pulsing the FETs at a clean 32-Khz — well beyond the audible range, which means we won’t hear that piercing 8-Khz whine that’s so characteristic of cheap BLDC motor controllers.

Curious? Check out [Cameron’s] firmware and driver design on the Githubs.

Of course, there are caveats. [Cameron’s] magnetic encoder solution has a few milliseconds of lag that needs to be characterized. We also need to glue a magnet to the shaft of our motor, which won’t fly in all of our projects that have major space constraints. Finally, there’s just plain old physics. In the real world, motor torque is directly proportional to current, so stalling an off-the-shelf bldc motor at max torque will burn them out since no propeller is pushing air through them to cool them off. Nevertheless, [Cameron’s] closed loop controller, at long last, can give the homebrew robotics community the chance to explore these limits.

Make A BLDC Motor From Scraps You Can Find In The Garage

Think you’ve got what it takes to build a homebrew brushless motor? As [JaycubL] shows us, it turns out that a bldc motor may be living in pieces right under your nose, in scraps that so many of us would otherwise toss aside. To get our heads turning, [JaycubL] takes us into the theory of brushless DC motors operate. He then builds a homebrew brushless motor using screws, a plastic container, a few bearings, a metal rod, some magnets, and a dab of epoxy. Finally, he gives it a whirl with an off-the-shelf motor controller.

This isn’t [JaycubL’s] first dive into homebrew brushless motors. For the curious, he’s also assembled a fully-functional brushless outrunner motor with a paint can housing.

Sure, understanding the principles is one thing, but being able to take the leap into the real world and find the functional beginnings of a motor from your scrap bin is an entirely different story! [JaycubL’s], dare we say, finesse of understanding the principles behind motor design makes us wonder: how many other functional higher-level electrical and mechanical components can we bootstrap from bitter scrap? To get you started, we’ll point you in the direction of this CNC router that’s just a few steps away from one trip to the hardware store.

Thanks for the tip, [John]!

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Anti-Cogging Algorithm Brings Out The Best In Your Hobby Brushless Motors

Cheap, brushless motors may be the workhorses behind our RC planes and quadcopters these days, but we’ve never seen them  in any application that requires low-speed precision. Why? Sadly, cheap brushless motors simply aren’t mechanically well-constructed enough to offer precise position control because they exhibit cogging torque, an unexpected motor characteristic that causes slight variations in the output torque that depend rotor position. Undaunted, [Matthew Piccoli] and the folks at UPenn’s ModLab have developed two approaches to compensate and minimize torque-ripple, essentially giving a cheap BLDC Motor comparable performance to it’s pricier cousins. What’s more, they’ve proven their algorithm works in hardware by building a doodling direct-drive robotic arm from brushless motors that can trace trajectories.

Cogging torque is a function of position. [Matthew’s] algorithm works by measuring the applied voltage (or current) needed to servo the rotor to each measurable encoder position in a full revolution. Cogging torque is directional, so this “motor fingerprint” needs to be taken in both directions. With these measured voltages (or currents) logged for all measurable positions, compensating for the cogging torque is just a matter of subtracting off that measured value at any given position while driving the motor. [Matthew] has graciously taken the trouble of detailing the subtleties in his paper (PDF), where he’s actually developed an additional acceleration-based method.

Hobby BLDC motors abound these days, and you might even have a few spares tucked away on the shelf. This algorithm, when applied on the motor controller electronics, can give us the chance to revisit those projects that mandate precise motor control with high torque–something we could only dream about if we could afford a few Maxon motors. If you’re new to BLDC Motor Control theory, check out a few projects of the past to get yourself up-and-running.

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