Close

Communications

A project log for 12v Motor Driver

This board is to drive a 12v 5A motor using a microcontroller.

jlbrian7jlbrian7 02/08/2015 at 14:300 Comments

Yesterday, I thought that I had all of the kinks worked out. I had three boards working off of one arduino and everything seemed to be going well, but then the problems started again.

I am pretty sure that the problem that I am having is the timing for the serial communication. Sometimes the string will get messed up, and I had come up with several ways to make sure that I got a good data stream, but it was at the cost of update time. Ensuring that I got good data put considerable lag in the system. So for some applications the serial comms will work fine, but for this it won't. As of yesterday I thought I was beat, but there may be one more option.

The stellaris launchpad that is communicating with the arduino seems to be getting the data and getting it correctly every time, so what I am going to do is use it to pwm some pins on the stellaris launchpad and hook those pins to the analog pins on the arduino.

What I am hoping to accomplish is that the arduino only has to poll it's analog inputs and then produce a pwm on the appropriate pin. One consideration is that because the update will be faster and cleaner I will have to create a longer delay before changing the motor speed so that I don't keep popping the transistors.

More to follow...

Discussions