Jose I Quinones5/3/2018 Log #1
Today I present some pictures of some of the driver modules I have come to refer to as PowerPACks. In essence, PAC means Power Application Controller, and I must say this is an Active-Semi Inc's Trade Mark. I call my modules PowerPACks because they pack a heck of a lot of POWER for their size! And of course, they are PAC52xx based. Wordplay at its best...
On the pictures I loaded today, you can see four different modules. Do note the two on the left are made of a single board (standalone versions), whereas the two on the right are made of two boards (modular versions).
You can drive pretty much any motor topology you can think of. Brushed, tri phase BLDC or PMSM, tri phase steppers, and I am thinking of a way to even drive bipolar steppers! All you need to do is change the FW and VOILA!
There is also provisions to deal with pretty much any voltage range from 8V to 600V! At the moment, however, all of the existing modules can deal with anything in between 8V and 160V. I am not a big fan of 600V, but the device capable of handling these potentials has been available for many years! (Namely the PAC5250 or PAC5253).
I will start loading schematics and posting videos on how to use these modules. They can be employed on robotic projects, automation, power tools and pretty much anywhere where a high power motor is required.
Discussions
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Yes, it could be accomplished easily! It would be a slightly different implementation, though. ODrive uses a single MCU to drive two tri phase motor power stages. You end up with three chips (one is an ST M4 MCU, and two TI DRV8301's or something like that). The same could be accomplished with two PAC5223's. However, there would have to be two pieces of FW as one motor would be the master and the other one the slave. There would be some advantages, though. O Drive has a maximum voltage of 48V, whereas the PAC5223 can do up to 72V. PAC52xx does not have CAN, though. That would be the only missing link.
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It seems to me that there is enough processing power and extras that you could make a hybrid of ODrive and Mechaduino ( https://hackaday.io/project/11224-mechaduino ) if you used the quad mosfet (NTMFS5C628NLT1G) design and added some hall sensors.
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You could definitely do a servo like the ones you propose. The Hall Sensor technology which would be employed would not be the typical three phase hall sensor topology but a magnetic position sensor. These use a diametrically magnetized magnet which a chip uses to extract absolute position. They are amazing! But yeah, the PAC could easily do it! Probably on my to do list, but not in the near term, I am afraid.
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I am curious, could this be used to make something on par with ODrive? https://hackaday.io/project/11583-odrive-high-performance-motor-control
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