{"id":205,"date":"2022-01-09T14:00:37","date_gmt":"2022-01-09T06:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.leafmotor.com\/blog\/?p=205"},"modified":"2022-01-09T14:00:49","modified_gmt":"2022-01-09T06:00:49","slug":"how-to-build-brushless-motor-controller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.leafmotor.com\/blog\/how-to-build-brushless-motor-controller\/","title":{"rendered":"How to build brushless motor controller"},"content":{"rendered":"

How to build a pretty basic dual brushless motor<\/strong><\/a> controller? I’m going to focus on the power section in this post, and as soon as I have time I’ll discuss the code\/FroBoard side of things in another post. I got started on the power section last night after a copious amount of coffee, and wrapped it up this morning- it’s a pretty simple build if you’re used to building stuff on perf board. I firmly believe that the best way to learn how something works is to build it yourself- that’s how I learned about electric cars, and brushless motor control<\/strong><\/a> is no exception. So if you want to learn how brushless motor controllers work, build one! A controller this size is a great place to start if you’re just getting involved in brushless motor control- I would definitely recommend starting out with something like this if you plan on building a car-sized controller. In fact, my first brushless controller was essentially half of this controller. It’s good up to around 24 volts and 1 or 2 amps per motor, but with proper heatsinking it could probably take a bit more current.<\/p>\n

This post is written with the electronics hobbyist\/motor enthusiast in mind. It’s also turned out to be a bit longer than expected; ah well. I’ll try harder next time! Most of this won’t make any sense if you don’t have a rough understanding of what brushless motors are and how they work- if you’re in that group, no worries. There are lots of great sites out there explaining those details;\u00a0 unfortunately, I don’t have the space to go through it here. I’m really just hoping to take a little bit of the mystery out of brushless motor control and show that it isn’t all the black magic it can seem like- hopefully it helps a few hobbyists out there get a little further.<\/p>\n

This controller is currently driven by two FroBoards, which is definitely more processing power than is really needed- it’s cool because it leaves room to read encoders, do serial stuff, and anything else you want to do in addition to running the motors. I’m running a whole robot off of these two FroBoards- usually, the motor controller is a separate unit, and another processor is used to handle the higher level decisions. Right now, for instance, I have a serial routine set up that lets me use a terminal emulator (MacWise in my case) to drive the robot around using the number pad on my keyboard, and there is still tons of room for add-ons. With a storebought setup, this would probably take two separate motor controllers and a processor to control them. So anyway, that’s pretty cool. That said, this power section could just as easily be driven off of a different processor or board; it isn’t specific to the FroBoard.<\/p>\n

Likewise, it would be really easy to build a single motor controller for use with one processor or FroBoard in this style. It would just be a matter of getting rid of three of the half bridges. Anyway, without much ado, here’s a schematic for you all!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How to build a pretty basic dual brushless motor controller? I’m going to focus on the power section in this post, and as soon as I have time I’ll discuss the code\/FroBoard side of things in another post. I got …<\/p>\n

Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[54,21],"class_list":["post-205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brushless-motor","tag-brushless-motor","tag-brushless-motor-control"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leafmotor.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leafmotor.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leafmotor.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leafmotor.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leafmotor.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.leafmotor.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1628,"href":"https:\/\/www.leafmotor.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions\/1628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leafmotor.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leafmotor.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leafmotor.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}