REV BLDC MC V1.0 part 1

This is the controller I designed for my school club Rensselaer Electric Vehicle. (REV) Despite my year-long instest in RC stuff, this is actually the first time I decided to really build some RC stuff. Anyway, this is the first brushless motor controller I designed and built (not yet), the first PCB design experience, the first do-some-embedded-programming since my embedded course, the first...  Ok I'm a CS student (am I?) and it's been a while since my last soldering/building session.

Spec first, our car weighs about 300lbs (driver included), and it requires something like a 500w ebike hub motor to push it, so this would be the design spec:

Voltage: 36v
Continuous Current: 20A
Peak Current (10s): 50A

During the component selection phase, I came accross duke electric vehichles (DEV) website and found their design really useful. Patrick G Grady, The guy who designed their motor controller, is really helpful and gave me some really good advice to start. So here is the major components:

MCU:       Teensy 3.2
Driver:     DRV8301
MOSFET: IPT007N06N (60V/0.75mOhm)

Yeah I know the components can do much more than 20~50A, but why not? I would really like to see this thing doing something 100A or even 200A (then explode) in the future.

Then there is software. Since it's the first design, I decided to use the basic sensored 6-step commutation algorithm. Here are two good videos about it:

Brushless DC Motors & Control - How it Works (Part 1 of 2)
Brushless DC Motors & Control - How it Works (Part 2 of 2)

Since this is for the club I will call it "REV BLDC MC", and this is V1.0. The next part would be PCB schematic and layout. More motor controller stuff comming up in the future.

First Blog...

My name is Yichuan Wang, and I'm a CSE/CS student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  My interest is building stuff, and this is my project site.