Open Source Brushless Motor Controller

September 4, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 29 Comments

It’s been a long time coming, but efforts to create Open Source brushless motor controller are finally paying off.

The Open-BLDC project aims to create an open source motor controller for the brushless motors usually found in remote control airplanes, helicopters, and quadcopters. Normally, these motor controllers – usually called electronic speed controllers – can’t supply more than a few dozen amps, and are usually only controllable via a servo signal.

The Open-BLDC goes far beyond the capabilities of off-the-shelf ESCs with up to 200 amps of output, TTL level serial input, and the ability to use regenerative breaking.

While the Open-BLDC project is far from complete, the team working on the hardware hopes to add I2C, CAN, and PPM interfaces, along with speed and torque control.

There is no word on when, or even if, the Open-BLDC will ever be available for sale, but with the features it has it would be welcomed by just about any builder constructing a gigantic RC vehicle.

CPLD Motor Control

August 2, 2012 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

[Chris] continues cranking out the tutorials, this time around he’s showing how to use a CPLD for simple motor control. The demo hardware is pretty basic, he built his own FPGA/CPLD demo board a few years back which used a PLCC socket for easy interfacing. You should be able to use just about any gear you have on hand.

Of course the thing about these chips is that you’re working with hardware that can be run in parallel. [Chris] mentions that this is what makes it perfect for timing-critical applications. Here he’s using a motor driver that monitors a PWM signal, using the duty cycle to actuate the direction and speed at which the motor turns. After the break you can see a demonstration of the CPLD reading from an ADC chip and converting the value to a PWM signal. [Chris] has also used the same hardware for VGA signals; something that is usually a timing nightmare if done with a microcontroller.

If this leaves you thirsting for more CPLD goodness check out our own guide on the subject.

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Motor Controller Also Does Nyan Cat

March 18, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

As a freshman at UC Berkeley, [Keegan] has been helping out with his school’s Pioneers in Engineering program that gives high school students some hands on experience with engineering principles, usually by building robots. This year, [Keegan]’s project is a motor controller that just so happens to play the nyan cat song over the motor PWM output.

The motor controller is meant to replace the Pololu simple motor controller the PiE team is currently using. Onboard is an H-bridge chip and an ATmega328 that takes commands from an I2C bus. The ‘328 is loaded up with the Arduino bootloader making the firmware very accessible – a good thing for the high school students that will be building and programming these robots.

[Keegan] put up the Eagle files for the board up on the PiE Wiki. For now, just enjoy the dulcet tones of the pop tart cat theme song after the break.

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Repair A Misbehaving Motor Controller Board

February 20, 2012 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

It can be a real drag to fix a circuit board which has stopped working as intended, especially if you don’t have any reference material for the product. That’s the position that [Todd Harrison] found himself in when the controller for his mini-lathe gave up the ghost. He undertook and hefty repair process and eventually mapped out and repaired the driver board.

First off, we’re happy to report his success at the end of a year-long troubleshooting process; the entirety of which occupies six different posts. The link at the top is the conclusion, and you’ll find his final test video after the break. But as you can see from the image above, he was met with a lot of problems along the way. The first two segments show him reverse engineering the PCB, with a giant schematic coming out of the process. In part 3 he then started probing the board while it was live, with the smell of hot electronics causing him to disconnect the power every thirty seconds. One time he took too long and blew a resistor with the pictured results.

In the end it was a shorted PWM chip to blame. He tested a couple of different replacement options, dropped in the new part, and is now back in business. Continue reading “Repair A Misbehaving Motor Controller Board” →

Motor Drivers: Half H-bridge With Brake And More

October 28, 2011 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

Here’s a nice little circuit that will drive a motor and allow you to stop its rotation, giving your robot a set of brakes. It’s part of [JM’s] post about the in’s and out’s of building microcontroller friendly motor controllers (translated).

This particular setup is a half H-bridge. It allows you to drive the motor in one direction only. The MOSFET used on the ground-side of the motor doesn’t actually need to be there. This is the brake which let you electronically stop the motor from spinning. Without it, the motor will keep turning under its own momentum when the half-bridge is shut off. Depending on the application this can be a big problem. There’s a great demonstration of the circuit braking a fast spinning motor in the video clip below the fold.

It is possible to use this driver with PWM, but [JM] has some warnings about inbuilt functions like FastPWM. Make sure you read his admonition, and if you need a refresher don’t miss this Hackaday video segment.

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Tinywrench Controls Motors With ATtiny24 Chips

October 9, 2011 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

Tinywrench is [Tanjent’s] take on a motor controller board. It aims to replicate all of the functions that a standalone motor controller chip offers at as low a cost as possible. Early results are in. It works, and as seen can be assembled for about $8.

The top of the device offers a terminal block for connecting motors, ground, and 24V input. A pin header on the bottom has all the connections you would expect to find with a stepper motor driver board. Looking back on top there’s also a pair of ATtiny24 chips, each with its own trimpot for balancing the constant current output. Hiding on the underside of the board are two H-bridges built using high and low-side MOSFETs along with some diodes for protection, and various passive components for driving them.

As it stands, each of those H-bridges can handle around 9 amps which should be more than enough for projects with small motors. [Tanjent] mentions that one of the main advantages of working with this instead of a single motor-driver chip is that if you fry one of the MOSFETs you can replace it instead of trashing the entire board.

Intro To DC Motor Control Using The SN754410

July 21, 2011 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

So your electronic hobby skills are coming along quite nicely but you’re not very comfortable doing more than blinking a few LEDs. Now’s a good time to try something new by driving a couple of DC motors.

You probably know that you can’t just hook these up to the pins of your favorite uC and call it good. The motors draw a lot of current (especially if they’re strained in lifting a heavy load) which would burn out your logic circuitry. Add to this the excess induced current that is generated when a spinning motor is shut off and you’re going to need a control system that can handle these dangers.

Enter the h-bridge motor driver. [Chris] has guided us through the process of building and using a H-bridge in the past. This time he’s using a motor controller that has four half H-bridges built into it. He hooks up the SN754410 to two motors, giving him speed and direction control for both based on the duty cycle of a PWM signal entering the chip for less than $2.50. Check out the video after the break for an overview of his methodology, then work your way through the multi-page post that he recently published.

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