Fuel Economy, Hypermiling, EcoModding News and Forum - EcoModder.com - View Single Post - Paul & Sabrina's cheap DIY 144v motor controller

MazdaMatt · 03-12-2009, 09:45 AM

I'm just full of posts this morning....

Yesterday at work we had the fellows from Freescale (makers of microcontrollers and sensors, our primary supplier of such things) in for a mini-seminar on "what's new" from them. One of the things they had to show was a new series of motor control "DSC"s. A DSC is like a DSP (Digital Signal Processor) except that it has onboard flash (thereby making it a controller, not a processor). So I looked it up... and it turns out that they have a 100 dollar "demo kit" that comes with firmware. The demo kit is in 2 parts - a control board, and a power board that has a 9v 6W 3-phase BLDC motor attached. So if one were so inclined, one could use this demo kit to develop really sweet control system, then pop off the control board and design a high-powered driver board (*cough*) and connect up to that instead.
The best part is that the firmware comes with all of the control system stuff you could want. It reads Hall sensors to determine shaft position and controlls voltage via pwm to set the speed. It even has overvoltage PWM shutdown protection.
The processors are internally designed to be helpful for designing motor control. One of the features is a special timer that triggers on the rising or falling edge of the pwm. When that timer expires, it will trigger an ADC reading. The purpose of this is to ensure that you are never taking an ADC reading DURING your switching time. You switch the fets, wait a couple microseconds, then autometically read the current sensors. fancy stuff. The PWM module also has full-speed center-align mode, something they didn't have on their previous controllers. LINK:
APMOTOR56F8000 Product Summary Page

I'm going to look more into this... They usually also provide schematics and sometimes board layout files with their demo kits.

03-12-2009, 09:45 AM	#544 (permalink)
MazdaMatt Master EcoModder Join Date: Jun 2008 Location: London, Ontario Posts: 1,096 2k2Prot5 - '02 Mazda Protege5 90 day: 33.82 mpg (US) Thanks: 0 Thanked 17 Times in 14 Posts	I'm just full of posts this morning.... Yesterday at work we had the fellows from Freescale (makers of microcontrollers and sensors, our primary supplier of such things) in for a mini-seminar on "what's new" from them. One of the things they had to show was a new series of motor control "DSC"s. A DSC is like a DSP (Digital Signal Processor) except that it has onboard flash (thereby making it a controller, not a processor). So I looked it up... and it turns out that they have a 100 dollar "demo kit" that comes with firmware. The demo kit is in 2 parts - a control board, and a power board that has a 9v 6W 3-phase BLDC motor attached. So if one were so inclined, one could use this demo kit to develop really sweet control system, then pop off the control board and design a high-powered driver board (cough) and connect up to that instead. The best part is that the firmware comes with all of the control system stuff you could want. It reads Hall sensors to determine shaft position and controlls voltage via pwm to set the speed. It even has overvoltage PWM shutdown protection. The processors are internally designed to be helpful for designing motor control. One of the features is a special timer that triggers on the rising or falling edge of the pwm. When that timer expires, it will trigger an ADC reading. The purpose of this is to ensure that you are never taking an ADC reading DURING your switching time. You switch the fets, wait a couple microseconds, then autometically read the current sensors. fancy stuff. The PWM module also has full-speed center-align mode, something they didn't have on their previous controllers. LINK: APMOTOR56F8000 Product Summary Page I'm going to look more into this... They usually also provide schematics and sometimes board layout files with their demo kits.