Paul & Sabrina's cheap DIY 144v motor controller - Page 249 - Fuel Economy, Hypermiling, EcoModding News and Forum

mike_lera · 10-24-2009, 01:28 PM

Paul were you looking over my sholder? i installed L1 backwards and took out R1 last night. cahaged it this morning. hooked up some 1k resistors and now i have a solid idle light on. but the out put on the gate resistors still dont look right.

MPaulHolmes · 10-24-2009, 01:37 PM

The gate resistor output will NOT look like a pwm signal because the software is wanting to get feedback from the LEM. You might see something weird if you are lucky, since I think you have Joe's code, so it's not purely throttle proportional to current.. The only way you will know if it's working is if you either put software on that is purely throttle proportional to pwmDuty, or build a whole power section and run a smallish motor. hehe. I'll mail you a chip asap.

mike_lera · 10-24-2009, 01:41 PM

paul
can i change the software with the program that jack is using as i did not install a socket on the avr>

MPaulHolmes · 10-24-2009, 01:57 PM

Well cool! That saves me $0.45 on shipping! hehe. Jack made a little piece of hardware for programming it. I think it was pretty easy. Then you can upload a new program that contains the bootloader, and from that point on, you can just use the serial port to program the chip.

mike_lera · 10-24-2009, 02:00 PM

which program do i load into the avr for the software change? the one off the wiki

MPaulHolmes · 10-24-2009, 02:14 PM

Actually, I have a pre-compiled .hex file that just needs to be transferred to the chip. Fran made it. It has the bootloader and the program all wrapped up into one! I'll email it to you.

mike_lera · 10-24-2009, 02:16 PM

jackbauer · 10-24-2009, 03:11 PM

Paul yeah the rainy season has started in Ireland. It will probably last well into june 2010! I'm happy enough with the params right now but its great to know they can be altered. Motor i have in the car is compound wound so will probably need some tweaking. I'm thinking of wiring the shunt field in parallel with the series field/armature for testing. Then i'll try a seperate shunt power supply. Do you reckon i'll have a problem with the esr of the bus caps? I have 2x 3900uf 400v and 2x 1500uf 400v in parallel.

Mike the software you need is called ponyprog and you can make a little header circuit to talk to the micro via the icsp port.
AVR Programmer
PonyProg - Serial device programmer

mike_lera · 10-24-2009, 05:48 PM

Jack
Iam a hardware type of guy and learning software. with the programer that you showed all of the pins are available at J4 (isp port) except for the 2 that go to 7 and 8 how did you get around that? are you just using the traces on the board to get back to them?
sorry for all the ?
Thanks
Mike

jackbauer · 10-24-2009, 06:00 PM

Mike pins 7 and 8 are just power (+5v) and ground. No need to connect to those as the control board provides power. I socketed my micro so just built the programmer on a piece of stripboard but i see no reason that it wont work in circuit. I'm on a learning curve myself. Up to a few weeks ago i knew nothing about atmel micros or c programming having used pic micros and assembler both at work and for hobby projects. Are you building your own power section?