Project Logs

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• Life

  Christopher Xu • 01/18/2023 at 06:54 • 0 comments

  Safely powers up! Still waiting on the MA702 to arrive, but until then I’ll start on blinking the LEDs, communication with external MCU, and toggling the Mosfets.

  

• Christopher Xu • 01/14/2023 at 02:04 • 0 comments

  I’m excited

  

• Tinymovr

  Christopher Xu • 01/13/2023 at 20:26 • 0 comments

  Found out about the Tinymovr motor controller. Basically what I'm trying to do! Very cool, and my version 2 will use it as reference. I hope to make mine even smaller (27x27mm vs 40x36mm) and cheaper ($40 vs €89). I only need up to 13V (3S lipo), while theirs goes up to 38V. Huge respect to their firmware too, lots of features there. 

• The past

  Christopher Xu • 01/13/2023 at 20:17 • 0 comments

  This project started when I tried to make a jumping robot. It jumped, but the servo seemed weak for its weight. I looked into brushless motors, but existing drone and car ESCs did not have the positional accuracy at low speeds and the more complex sensored motor drivers like the Odrive were too bulky, and also expensive. So, I tried to make my very first PCBs:

  The motor driver board is the small one on the right, designed to fit behind the red motor. The larger board serves as the main controller, and this main board can control up to two driver boards. I based my design on the RAA227063 gate driver IC, and the PWM commands must be sent from the Teensy 4.0 on the main board. This worked, but only for a moment. 

  With any load, one of the high side mosfets would be burn out, ending up with the gate shorted to drain. I replaced the mosfet 2 times, with the same failure. After some crude probing I believe this was the result of ringing on the gate, because I didn't put a resistor between the driver and the gate, and the trace was probably not routed optimally. Next version, I'm adding a gate resistor and making it a 4-layer board, hoping that the extra ground planes will decrease parasitic inductance. There will also be RC snubbers on the output in case.

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