[MPaulHolmes]

80 MHz would be nice, but I'm OK with the ATMega8 for now. I can add a crystal oscillator to crank the speed up to 16 Mhz if I need to, but I don't think I will. The only major concern I had was keeping current under control, and I now that is not a problem, because I fully understand how to do a very robust hardware current limit. I'm using Fran's design. It's actually very clean. On a pulse by pulse basis, the 393 comparator and flip-flop doesn't let ANY current pulses get through to the mosfets (not even 1!), and the nand gates I'm using for the flip-flop (to remember the overcurrent condition) are very fast. Each time a pulse tries to get too big, the hardware shuts down the mosfet driver within NANOSECONDS, and keeps it off until the microcontroller gets around to turning it back on when the next pulse starts.

I'm very excited that I understand how to do this now. I worked on it the whole weekend, and had lots of chats with Fran. Fran is awesome. He is from some eastern bloc country, and recently made a controller that makes it so NO MECHANICAL BRAKING IS NEEDED! All of it is regen! He was testing it out on a very fast go-cart. It doesn't even have regular brakes! How awesome is that! He also just finished a controller that is VERY high power on a "tank" that's using like 300v of Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries. It's using 6 IGBTs. He sent me a video of it shoving back a 10,000 pound forklift, when the forklift was trying to fight back. It was really sad if you are a fan of really big forklifts. The forklift was whooped like a red-headed stepchild.

Also, the hardware current limiting costs around $1.00. Ya!