REV BLDC MC V1.0 part 3

The boards comes in, let's check it out.

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The board came out nice and clean. The manufacture did a good job on both PCB fab and assembly. Now it's time to take it to the shop for a spin since the software is already done (will be discussed in another blog). 

test day

Safety measure first : ). After that plywood shield is our prototype car for last year : ). And the order from left to right pretty much tells the degree of involvement when building this controller : ). 

The test went out great, actually it's too great. We got this thing spinned up within 20 minutes. Notice this is the first prototype of a PCB with 300+ pins and 100+ parts, with mixed signals, power stages, and communication stuff. It worked nearly right out of the box!!!

first spin up

 

throttle range test

It's been 9 months since our first idea of using DRV8301, and I'd say that the time and effort put into this controller is really what help our team grows.

This is the first time ever that our team designed our own brushless DC motor controller; actually it is the first motor controller that we built and WORKED.

More tests for this board will be performed, such as stress test and spinning different motors. The software will be fine tuned for the best performance. I'm very happy that this thing finally worked. One successful design opens up the door of a thousand more designs, and I'm on my way to get them captured in my work!