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New Product Ideas / Blushless 3 Phase DC electronic speed controller shield
« on: September 23, 2012, 12:25:57 AM »
This might be a bit of a stretch but for a while now I've been looking for an open hardware design for a 3-phase DC blushless motor electronic speed controller (ESC) for hobby engines used for multicopters. The reason is you can get these things cheap but they are the PWM servo interface style controllers (some can be hacked) with no telemetry information, and no I2C. Most of these controllers are Atmel chips and more then capable of providing speed information and in some cases power usage, all of which would be handy information to have feed back to your flight computer.
Starting with a smaller motor rating (say 10A) it should be possible to make a shield (might require a headsink or to be the top/only shield, my wish list would be:
* Battery draw current sensing.
* Temperature sensing.
* 3-phases driven by N/P mosfet pair, and voltage sensing for cross-over voltage detection, and PWM output to drive the mosfets.
* Voltage sensing of battery input.
Atmel have a lot of design notes, so it shouldn't be too hard. I'd be happy to provide some ideas regarding design and software. I think you could do a range of shields to provide kit based development for various parts of a multicopter, R/C plane, or otherwise for things like the flight computer with IMU (3-axis gyro/accel/compus), wireless communication, ESCs, etc.
Let me know if it sounds interesting or not, I have seen on kickstarter some interest in the IMU sheeld which I personally would be very keen on.
Cheers, Adam
Starting with a smaller motor rating (say 10A) it should be possible to make a shield (might require a headsink or to be the top/only shield, my wish list would be:
* Battery draw current sensing.
* Temperature sensing.
* 3-phases driven by N/P mosfet pair, and voltage sensing for cross-over voltage detection, and PWM output to drive the mosfets.
* Voltage sensing of battery input.
Atmel have a lot of design notes, so it shouldn't be too hard. I'd be happy to provide some ideas regarding design and software. I think you could do a range of shields to provide kit based development for various parts of a multicopter, R/C plane, or otherwise for things like the flight computer with IMU (3-axis gyro/accel/compus), wireless communication, ESCs, etc.
Let me know if it sounds interesting or not, I have seen on kickstarter some interest in the IMU sheeld which I personally would be very keen on.
Cheers, Adam