I have brought ROTATÉ into this world. ROTATÉ is a python utility that allows us to visualize and process the data from the JANKTROLLER in real time, which will be indispensable for tuning control loops and validating sensors. It isn’t pretty, but it gets the job done, and the underlying data passing system allows us to easily add messages and make logs. It is also fairly fault tolerant, as a delimiter or message tag gets dropped every now and then. In addition…
This week I worked with Deepak on figuring out the UART and DMA firmware that we are putting to test on Janktroller++. We found out that the gate driver on Janktroller has some built in deadtime, which we are using in addition to the deadtime we are setting in software, which initially was confusing but now makes more sense. Getting live UART data from the board meant that we were able to get live diagnostic data to better understand what…
This week we were able to get the motor spinning slowly. This involved a number of different things. The first one was bringup of the microcontroller’s timer to output PWM. Another accomplishment this week was writing a rudimentary control loop to spin the motor. We were also able to send information about the voltages and currents over UART. Overall, the motor spinning validates our basic hardware architecture, and we are confident in moving forward both with further firmware development, and…
This week I got the STM32’s PWM working and set it properly. This means making the PWM center-aligned, rather than edge-aligned, and inserting dead time as described in last week’s blog post. The PWM works fine, and Bolaji was able to use it to get the motor slowly spinning. The next thing I worked on was getting UART to work. It was fairly easy to set up in blocking mode, but it ended up causing a problem. The amount of…
This week, I adapted the PWM driver to take duty cycles for each phase and then ported the simulation stuff to the janktroller and it spun the motor. It was very good because it proved that all of the power controls and stuff works and gave us a baseline to start looking at ADC readings, but also very bad because we haven’t brought up the ADCs yet so it was entirely “dumb” control. Being able to make the motor move…