This project provides a scalable, powerful, and intelligent motor control system that the world is lacking. Current servo drives cost thousands and require proprietary (read garbage) control software that is often bloated, overpriced, and limited. Most of that price is insurance and lawyers, but still, we need something better.
With this system, cheaply available PCIe connectors are used as an interconnect fabric for high power handling and large scale system integration. Using the Raspberry Pi Zero reduces system cost significantly.
A multi-axis robotic manipulator can have a single motherboard housing several hot-swappable drives using PCIe x8 connectors. XT60 and MT60 connectors are used for the DC supply and the three phase AC output.
Future revisions will modify via placement and clearance. This design meets most IPC standards for 24V-36V bus voltage, but higher voltages are possible. Take that with a grain of salt. Testing. Testing. Testing.
After hundreds of milliamps released the VOC smoke of heck, it turns out, using optoisolators as gate drivers is a bad idea, and I wasted $50 of optoisolators and a board revision.
There's a reason I haven't released schematics yet, it would be like encouraging you to hurt yourself.
I'm going to revise this with the Microchip ATA6844 driver, and may switch to the Teensy dev environment, after an enlightening chat with Kai Yin. Thanks for stopping me from doing something dumb.