pwm

137 Articles

Scrap Bin Mods Move Science Forward

November 20, 2016 by 12 Comments

A first-time visitor to any bio or chem lab will have many wonders to behold, but few as captivating as the magnetic stirrer. A motor turns a magnet which in turn spins a Teflon-coated stir bar inside the beaker that sits on top. It’s brilliantly simple and so incredibly useful that it leaves one wondering why they’re not included as standard equipment in every kitchen range.

But as ubiquitous as magnetic stirrers are in the lab, they generally come in largish packages. [BantamBasher135] needed a much smaller stir plate to fit inside a spectrophotometer. With zero budget, he retrofitted the instrument with an e-waste, Arduino-controlled magnetic stirrer.

The footprint available for the modification was exceedingly small — a 1 cm square cuvette with a flea-sized micro stir bar. His first stab at the micro-stirrer used a tiny 5-volt laptop fan with the blades cut off and a magnet glued to the hub, but that proved problematic. Later improvements included beefing up the voltage feeding the fan and coming up with a non-standard PWM scheme to turn the motor slow enough to prevent decoupling the stir bar from the magnets.

[BantamBasher135] admits that it’s an ugly solution, but one does what one can to get the science done. While this is a bit specialized, we’ve featured plenty of DIY lab instruments here before. You can make your own peristaltic pump or even a spectrophotometer — with or without the stirrer.

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Primer On Servos Hits All The Basics

October 30, 2016 by 10 Comments

Servos are pretty basic fare for the seasoned hacker. But everyone has to start somewhere, and there’s sure to be someone who’ll benefit from this primer on servo internals. Who knows – maybe even the old hands will pick up something from a fresh perspective.

[GreatScott!] has been building a comprehensive library of basic electronics videos over the last few years that covers everything from using a multimeter to programming an Arduino. The last two installments delve into the electromechanical realm with a treatment of stepper motors along with the servo video below. He covers the essentials of the modern RC-type servo in a clear and engaging style that makes it easy for the newbie to understand how a PWM signal can translate into positional changes over a 180° sweep. He shows how to control a servo directly with an Arduino, with bonus points for including a simple 555-based controller circuit too. A quick look at the mods needed to convert any servo to continuous rotation wraps up the video.

If [GreatScott!]’s video whets your appetite for more, be sure to check out [Richard Baguley]’s deeper dive into servos. And when you’re ready to put your new-found knowledge into practice, maybe a nice project would be to convert a hobby servo into a linear actuator.

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Modifications to a Razor E300 motor controller to remove limits

Converting An Electric Scooter To Lithium Batteries And Disabling The Safeties

March 2, 2016 by 54 Comments

There’s a bunch of different electric scooters available nowadays, including those hoverboards that keep catching fire. [TK] had an older Razor E300 that uses lead acid batteries. After getting tired of the low speeds and 12 hour charge times, [TK] decided it was time to swap for lithium batteries.

The new batteries were sourced from a Ryobi drill. Each provides 18 V, giving 36 V in series. The original batteries only ran at 24 V, which caused some issues with the motor controller. It refused to start up with the higher voltage. The solution: disable the safety shutdown relay on the motor controller by bridging it with a wire.

With the voltage issue sorted out, it was time for the current limit to be modified. This motor controller uses a TI TL494 to generate the PWM waveforms that drive a MOSFET to provide variable power to the motor. Cutting the trace to the TL494’s current sense pin removed the current limit all together.

We’re not saying it’s advisable to disable all current and voltage limits on your scooter, but it seems to be working out for [TK]. The $200 scooter now does 28 km/h, up from 22 km/h and charges much faster. With gearing mods, he’s hoping to eke out some more performance.

After the break, the full conversion video.

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A Tiny Servo Motor Controller

December 18, 2015 by 33 Comments

If you’re building a moving thing with a microcontroller, you’ll probably want to throw a servo controller in the mix. Driving a servo or two with a microcontroller takes away valuable cycles that just babysit the servo, making sure all the PWM signals are in sync. The thing is, most servo controllers are a massive overkill, and you don’t need that much to control a few servos over a UART. The proof of this is an attiny13 servo controller over on hackaday.io.

[arief] developed his tiny servo controller around one of the tiniest microcontrollers – the ATtiny13. This chip has just 1kB of Flash and 64 Bytes of RAM, but that’s enough to keep a few servos going and listen in to a UART for commands to drive the servo.

The construction of this servo controller board is simple enough – just a single sided board, microcontroller, and a few headers, caps, and resistors. Commands are sent to the ATtiny through a half duplex UART we covered before, with servos responding to simple serial commands.

If you’re building a robot army, this is the board to make. You’re going to need a high-powered controller to take over the world, but there’s no need to bog down that controller by babysitting a few servos.

Taking The Pulse (Width Modulation) Of An FPGA

December 16, 2015 by 28 Comments

I like to think that there are four different ways people use FPGAs:

  1. Use the FPGA as a CPU which allows you to add predefined I/O blocks
  2. Build custom peripherals for an external CPU from predefined I/O blocks
  3. Build custom logic circuitry from scratch
  4. Projects that don’t need an FPGA, but help you learn

I’d bet the majority of FPGA use falls into categories one and two. Some FPGAs even have CPUs already built-in. Even without an onboard CPU, you can usually put a CPU “core” (think reusable library) into the chip. Either way, you can always add other cores to create UARTs, USB, Ethernet, PWM, or whatever other I/O you happen to need. You either connect them to a CPU on the chip, or an external one. With today’s tools, you often pick what you want from a list and then your entire project becomes a software development effort.

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Pulse Density Modulation

September 8, 2015 by 34 Comments

[esot.eric] was trying to drive a motor and naturally thought of using pulse width modulation (PWM) to control the motor speed. However, he found that even with a large capacitor, his underpowered power supply would droop before the PWM cycles were complete. So instead of PWM he decided to experiment with pulse density modulation.

The idea is to use smaller pulses over a longer period of time and make the average power equal to the percentage motor speed desired. With a PWM system, for example, if the time period is T, a 50% PWM drive would have the  drive high for T/2 and low for the other half of the cycle. With pulse density, each pulse might be T/10 (as an example) and then the output would be on for 1/10, off for 1/10, on for 1/10 and so on, until by time T you’d still get to 50%. The advantage is the output capacitor gets a kick more often and has less opportunity to droop.

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