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BLDC testing rig

A project log for linear actuations for everyone!

cheap artificial pseudo-muscles here

capitanveshdokiCapitanVeshdoki 05/25/2020 at 20:100 Comments

Long time no see! 
For two months melancholy was my companion, but it seems that season ended x)

And I want to introduce BLDC testing rig, as stated somewhere above. Here it is:

Designed to measure thrust generated by a propeller, for that purpose there is an electronic weight in place. Why thrust, you may ask? There is an interesting relationship between thrust and output power - it's perfectly linear. If that setup would generate more thrust with methods suggested before, it would mean that it is more effective, definitely. Even through it seems to work, it should help to get more convincing numbers, I'm not talking about power measured in watts, since it requires different rig, but in terms of how output power relates it does it's job.

Unfortunately, "controller" has a tendency to burn on voltages higher than 10V, that limits output power it's capable of and I cannot get any trustworthy readings of such a small thrust with those scales. It's important to take friction in account as well - with more powerful hardware impact of a friction would be insignificant.

Though I possibly can use high currents, FETs heat up and I need to solve that problem too. In a next iteration of a design. Thing is - I hardly can see any difference between widely used ESC's schematics and my design, no special protection there (may it be board layout?)

Now I'm quite busy with a deadline of other project, I don't think I would return here with a new version of a BLDC-thing in near future but who knows, maybe I would find that small mistake in circuitry and make current version work

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