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700 points elipsitz | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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TaylorAlexander ◴[] No.41194755[source]
This is very exciting! For the last several years I have been developing a brushless motor driver based on the RP2040 [1]. The driver module can handle up to 53 volts at 30A continuous, 50A peak. I broke the driver out to a separate module recently which is helpful for our farm robot and is also important for driver testing as we improve the design. However this rev seems pretty solid, so I might build a single board low cost integrated single motor driver with the RP2350 soon! With the RP2040 the loop rate was 8khz which is totally fine for big farm robot drive motors, but some high performance drivers with floating point do 50khz loop rate.

My board runs SimpleFOC, and people on the forum have been talking about building a flagship design, but they need support for sensorless control as well as floating point, so if I use the new larger pinout variant of the RP2350 with 8 ADC pins, we can measure three current signals and three bridge voltages to make a nice sensorless driver! It will be a few months before I can have a design ready, but follow the git repo or my twitter profile [2] if you would like to stay up to date!

[1] https://github.com/tlalexander/rp2040-motor-controller

[2] https://twitter.com/TLAlexander

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roshankhan28 ◴[] No.41198988[source]
i am not a engineer type of person but to even thing that someone is trying to create a motor is really impressive. When i was a kid , i used t break my toy cars and would get motors from it and felt like i really did something. good ol' days.
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1. throwaway81523 ◴[] No.41199045[source]
The motor controller is impressive, but it sounds like a motor controller (as it says), rather than a motor. That is, it's not mechanical, it's electrical, it sends inputs to the motor telling it when to turn the individual magnets on and off. That is a nontrivial challenge since it has to monitor the motor speeds under varying loads and send pulses at exactly the right time, but it's software and electronics, not machinery.