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Open source (software and hardware) DC motor controller for electric gates

manuManu 01/21/2015 at 23:520 Comments

It's been 2 months since I have installed my proto board and it works barely well.

It is a minimal system compared to my first intentions: it justs open an close the 2 arms of my opener from the original remote control (433MHz).

I made some adjustements to make it usable before winter:

- no more mosfet pwm control to slow down the motors before they stall. At the nominal voltage, everything runs fine as it take about 20 seconds to fully open, or close, the doors. I don't want to slow it down because, even when an arm reaches its mechanical limit, it is slow enough not to damage anything. So, let's use the maximal speed.

- to make my proto board fits in the original case, I switched to an arduino pro mini

- as the original 24V is just a rectified 24V without filtering (I removed the, maybe dying, original big electrolytic cap) it only powers motors. Yet, I added a 24V regulated power supply from the main ac power supply (230V here in Europe) stepped down to 5V to power the logic part of the system (little Traco Power integrated switching module under the arduino Pro Mini).

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