Im a self-taught robotics engineer who has also worked on rockets, jet engines and drones throughout his aerospace degree in his spare time. Now ive cofounded a robotics company in London, Paddington Robotics. ROBOTICS JOURNEYMEN. LET ME IN.

RT @FangSystems: How do you design a BLDC motor driver for high-power robotics?. Here's a thread 🧵 detailing my 5-year journey from basic A….

For layout, follow the many resources online. I highly suggest this TI app note. Good luck!

Bus Caps:.Your driver wants as many as it can get! .- Use ceramics to handle the ripple current (~30% peak phase amperage). - Use aluminium to handle the ripple voltage (keep it within ~5%). Use the minimum number as they are expensive and take up space on the board.

Communication:.Just use CAN. Dont trust wireless methods unless you can trust your code to shut down safely when the bluetooth drops. Drivers:.TI's DRV series. They have everything integrated into one nice package and will probably end up cheaper than a discrete solution.

With STM32s, you can get the DMA system to do most of the heavy lifting and has incredibly powerful ADCs. This is VERY important as for FOC, you need it to fire during the low side FET conduction which could only be ~20us. Calling an analogRead() isnt going to cut it.

Theres a reason your car has probably 100 STM32s/Microchip ICs inside and no ESP32s. Reliability and robustness. I really like ESP32s but I dont think they are the most suitable for motor controllers. Very fast, dual core chips but less robust and less transparent.

IC selection:.Pick an IC that you would trust your life on. If its connected to a high power motor, you dont want it randomly doing stuff. Along with high performance, this results in most people using the STM32 ICs, mostly F1s, F4s or G4s.

VERSION 4:.Back to custom PCB! Ive learnt enough over my PCBs to understand the requirements and make a PCB that is as basic as possible. No fancy bucks in series, no fancy copper bus bars. Just a single 4 layer PCB that works.

VERSION 3:.I decided to stop messing about with a custom PCB and just decided to clone the ODrive v3.6. This did not fit nicely with the rest of the robot design. Long power cables next to sensor cables was not a good idea. And the copper bus bar was impossible to solder

VERSION 2:.Learnt a lot and this time decided to use discrete FET drivers and op amps. Also finally switched to a 4 layer PCB. This PCB still had issues with not enough bus capacitors and a poorly laid out buck converter.

VERSION 1:.My first "real" PCB where layout actually mattered and my first time using an STM32!. My layout was horrible, I had huge noise on the current sense path, couldnt get above 15A/phase and there was no margin on the bus voltage for regen. But it could spin motors!

For robotics, the FOC algorithm is almost essential. It lets you independently control torque, velocity and position of a brushless motor. It works by swinging around a magnetic field by energizing the 3 coils of the stator at the correct time, controlling current directly.

How do you design a BLDC motor driver for high-power robotics?. Here's a thread 🧵 detailing my 5-year journey from basic Arduino knowledge to creating a fully functional BLDC driver for my quadruped robot!. #JLCONE

we upgrading from LeRobot to AgileX 🔥🔥🔥. going to pick up and put down so much shit

ooh

Starting to learn ANSYS FLUENT bcus jet engine project but my combustion chamber design is so ass 💔. (im vibe CADing a 3D printable jet engine to revive the jet engine project I made in high school)

SHART WASHER😭.

Do you guys think i got enough lidars?. The Slamtec C1 lidars have been really amazing. You can a 12m range lidar with 0.72deg resolution at 10Hz all for £50. Might do a teardown of one of them if people are interested!

Debugging the jetson and power distribution board today!. Features:.-3 x 1MB/s FD-CAN transceivers. -Hot-swap controller up to 60V. Logic handled in hardware, impossible for software glitch to short. -Dual channel up to 100A bidirectional with current sensing (not populated)

Update on the ESP32 counter project!. My friend drew a small cat animation and got it to play on the screen :). Just got to make some small setup changes and soon we are going to make a new PCB and focus on making it as slim as possible (7.5mm). Fully portable and wearable size!